Roche CEO Severin Schwan will be moving to the board chairman role in a few months, making room for Thomas Schinecker — the current chief of the diagnostics division — to take the helm of the Swiss pharma conglomerate.

The changeover will take place at the company’s annual general meeting in March as Christoph Franz, chairman since 2014, decided not to seek re-election to the board.

The shuffle at the top comes as Roche has steadily beefed up its early-stage pipeline while vigilantly guarding its position as one of the top drugmakers around the world. By Evaluate’s estimate, it is set to rank second on the list of largest pharmas by 2028, falling just a tad behind AbbVie.

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Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

With earnings seasons in full swing, we’ve listened in on all the calls so you don’t have to. But news is popping up from all corners, so make sure you check out our other updates, too.

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Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) this week sent a letter to the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services seeking an update on how and when new inflation-linked rebates will take effect for drugs that see major price spikes.

The newly signed Inflation Reduction Act requires manufacturers to pay a rebate to Medicare when they increase drug prices faster than the rate of inflation.

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Bristol Myers Squibb CEO Giovanni Caforio is shifting his focus to newer products as generic sales continue to gnaw at the company’s blockbuster myeloma drug Revlimid.

Both Revlimid and Abraxane sales took a dive last year thanks to generic rivals, BMS reported in its Q4 and full-year results on Thursday. As a result, Q4 sales dipped 5% and full-year sales remained flat. However, Caforio sees a silver lining — or rather, two of them.

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Merck’s cancer immunotherapy Keytruda notched sales of $20.9 billion in 2022, cementing its status as one of the world’s top-selling drugs. However, it’s far from resting on that accomplishment.

Merck executives touted nine ongoing trials in its annual earnings call on Thursday, including five studies in Phase III, for Keytruda (pembrolizumab) in combination with other immuno-oncology drugs. The trials include combinations with Merck’s own developments as well as other pharma companies’ candidates, including its melanoma collaboration with Moderna and its mRNA technology plus Keytruda, aimed at creating a personalized vaccine treatment to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence or death.

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GSK has secured the first of four US approvals it’s hoping for this year, as the FDA greenlit daprodustat as a treatment for anemia due to chronic kidney disease.

But the FDA limited the use of the drug, to be marketed as Jesduvroq, to patients who have been receiving dialysis for at least four months and stopped short of approving it for patients not dependent on dialysis — in line with the recommendations of the advisory committee it consulted.

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By the time 2023 is over, Novartis expects to be moving much lighter: It will have spun out its generics subsidiary Sandoz, completed layoffs of thousands of staffers worldwide and put in new internal structures for running the company.

And it will be ready to hunt for blockbusters.

CEO Vas Narasimhan underscored Novartis’ upcoming transformation into a “pure-play” company, reiterating across a series of calls — one with reporters, two with investors and analysts — that the new structure would boost its R&D productivity and sharpen its focus on big, new medicines.

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