Ian Read is of­fi­cial­ly bow­ing out of Pfiz­er.

Af­ter a brief stint as ex­ec­u­tive chair­man — su­per­vis­ing his suc­ces­sor Al­bert Bourla’s first year as CEO — Read is re­tir­ing at the end of the year and turn­ing over the chair­man role to Bourla. De­cem­ber 31, 2019 will mark the con­clu­sion of Read’s 41 years at the phar­ma gi­ant $PFE.

Al­bert Bourla

Bourla is gath­er­ing the reins amid a flur­ry of ac­tion to re­shape Pfiz­er in­to a “small­er, more fo­cused, sci­ence-based com­pa­ny with a sin­gu­lar fo­cus on in­no­v­a­tive phar­ma.” Weeks ago the com­pa­ny re­vealed plans to com­bine its off-patent drug busi­ness, Up­john, with My­lan — fol­low­ing an ear­li­er deal to spin off its con­sumer health unit in­to a joint ven­ture with Glax­o­SmithK­line.

Read — a vo­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the in­dus­try, who’s un­afraid to de­fend his some­what con­tro­ver­sial views on things like megamerg­ers and drug price hikes but al­so open to chang­ing his mind — said he be­lieves “Pfiz­er’s best days are yet to come.”

It is now up to Bourla, a vet­eri­nar­i­an by train­ing who joined Pfiz­er in 1993 and be­came COO in 2017, to ex­e­cute on a new vi­sion that in­volves dou­bling down on the in­ter­nal late-stage as­sets while keep­ing an eye on bolt-on M&A deals to re­plen­ish the ear­ly- and mid-stage pipeline.

In his send­off for Read, the new chair­man and CEO heaped praise on his men­tor:

I want to thank Ian for his un­wa­ver­ing ded­i­ca­tion to Pfiz­er over the past four decades and dur­ing this lead­er­ship tran­si­tion. As a re­sult of his un­re­lent­ing fo­cus on cul­ture, cre­at­ing val­ue and de­vel­op­ing tal­ent, Pfiz­er has be­come a stronger and more sta­ble in­sti­tu­tion. His lead­er­ship and coun­sel have been in­valu­able to the com­pa­ny, and more per­son­al­ly, I have ben­e­fit­ed great­ly from Ian’s ad­vice, guid­ance and friend­ship.

The tran­si­tion “is the re­sult of a sys­temic and com­pre­hen­sive suc­ces­sion plan un­der­tak­en by the board sev­er­al years ago,” added Shan­tanu Narayen, the lead in­de­pen­dent di­rec­tor on the board.

The researcher behind base-editing is out with what some scientists are hailing as the biggest advancement in CRISPR technology since that 2016 breakthrough: “prime editing.” The new molecular gadget is capable of erasing any base pair and stenciling in another and cutting or adding long segments of DNA without breaking both strands of the helix.

David Liu, base editing pioneer and founder of Beam Therapeutics, published the findings in Nature alongside Andrew Anzalone. They estimated that the breakthrough “in principle” puts 89% of human diseases in purview — although experts cautioned that human therapies were a long way off.

For the past three years Frazier Healthcare Partners’ Bhaskar Chaudhuri has been carefully and quietly grooming Arcutis Therapeutics, a new dermatology play he co-founded to deliver topical formulations of well-known drugs. Now that the biotech is poised to enter Phase III, he’s being joined by a marquee syndicate for its $94.5 million Series C.

HBM Healthcare Investments, Vivo Capital, BlackRock, Omega Funds, Pivotal BioVentures, and Goldman Sachs jumped on board, joining Bain Capital Life Sciences, OrbiMed and RA Capital Management in backing Arcutis’ lead topical cream for plaque psoriasis.

The remedy for the most common side effect for one of the most common multiple sclerosis drugs is simple: aspirin.

Taking aspirin with Biogen’s Tecfidera will reduce the flush, a sometimes painful form of red skin irritation, many patients experiences. The problem is that the aspirin has to be taken at least 30 minutes before Tecfidera, turning a simple twice-a-day, one-dose oral drug into a staggered two-drug regimen.

Despite a head start, when Bristol-Myers Squibb and its pioneering checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo suffered a key lung cancer setback in 2016, they found themselves relegated to the backseat as Merck’s Keytruda seized the wheel on the road to immunotherapy stardom. Bristol-Myers has since suffered blow after blow in its quest to take a big slice of the lucrative market, peppered with some small successes. On Tuesday, the New Jersey drugmaker touted positive data from a Phase III open-label study in a bid to carve itself a piece of the frontline lung cancer market.