Kronos Bio is vacating its corporate headquarters amid a wider cost-cutting exercise for the struggling biotech.
The company, which has been focused on developing small-molecule drugs for cancers and other diseases caused by deregulated transcription, revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that is in the process of terminating the lease for the building in San Mateo, California.
Rather than remain at the site until the lease comes to its scheduled end in August 2026, Kronos has now agreed with the building’s landlord to depart by the end of this month. The biotech will still pay $1.4 million of the $1.6 million rent that would have been due if it had stayed for the additional 16 months.
As well as the base in San Mateo, Kronos still lists a research facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The closure of the California headquarters comes five months after Kronos laid off 83% of its workforce, including its CEO at the time, Norbert Bischofberger, Ph.D. The company had made the significant restructure in the wake of shelving its last remaining clinical asset, the CDK9 inhibitor istisociclib, after reviewing troubling safety signals from a phase 1/2 trial in platinum-resistant high-grade serous ovarian cancer.
The company entered 2025 with $112.4 million on hand, despite having lost $29.5 million over the previous year due to the “impairment of long-lived assets and restructuring charges,” it explained in its full-year earnings results last month.
As of that earnings report, Kronos was still in the process of evaluating “potential strategic alternatives focused on maximizing stockholder value, including, but not limited to, an acquisition, merger, reverse merger, other business combination, sales of assets, or other strategic transactions.”