Af­ter a roller coast­er ride, Sage COO strikes out on his own to chart a new biotech path

Three months af­ter for­mer Al­ny­lam pres­i­dent Bar­ry Greene took over Sage Ther­a­peu­tics from Jeff Jonas, he’s los­ing his right-hand man.

Chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer Mike Cloo­nan, who’s been with Sage for four years, has de­cid­ed it’s time for him to pur­sue a CEO po­si­tion in bio­phar­ma — though it’s un­clear where yet. Greene and the rest of the team, he added, were sup­port­ive.

Since join­ing the Cam­bridge-based neu­ro biotech from Bio­gen, Cloo­nan had been put in charge of every­thing from com­mer­cial, port­fo­lio and pro­gram man­age­ment, med­ical af­fairs, tech­ni­cal op­er­a­tions, gov­ern­ment af­fairs, cor­po­rate de­vel­op­ment and ad­min­is­tra­tive func­tions — all aimed at shap­ing a sol­id busi­ness around the brain health drugs Sage had been de­vel­op­ing.

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