Centes­sa is wast­ing no time as­sem­bling the top team in charge of spear­head­ing its port­fo­lio play.

While pre­sum­ably go­ing on vir­tu­al road­shows for its up­com­ing IPO, the biotech put out word that it’s ap­point­ed An­toine Yver, the for­mer head of on­col­o­gy R&D at Dai­ichi Sankyo, as CMO.

Francesco De Ru­ber­tis

With 16 pro­grams in the pipeline — four of which have al­ready reached clin­i­cal stage — that came to­geth­er af­ter Francesco De Ru­ber­tis con­vinced 11 Medicxi star­tups to roll their op­er­a­tions in­to the same com­pa­ny, Yver is sure to hit the ground run­ning. CEO Saurabh Sa­ha clear­ly has no doubt about that, prais­ing his new de­vel­op­ment chief as a “true in­dus­try leader.”

Be­fore join­ing the Japan­ese phar­ma, Yver (a pe­di­atric on­col­o­gist by train­ing) had served as As­traZeneca’s glob­al med­i­cine head of on­col­o­gy, where he was cred­it­ed for lead­ing EGFR in­hibitor Tagris­so’s rapid jour­ney from first hu­man dose to US ap­proval in less than three years. Oth­er no­table drugs on his belt in­clude the PARP in­hibitor Lyn­parza and En­her­tu, the HER2-tar­get­ing an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gate that As­traZeneca bet up to $6 bil­lion on.

The role at Centes­sa will take him far be­yond can­cer. With­in the group of clin­i­cal drugs, there’s an EGFR an­ti­body for cu­ta­neous squa­mous cell car­ci­no­ma and sol­id tu­mors, but the oth­er three are de­signed to treat he­mo­phil­ia, au­to­so­mal dom­i­nant poly­cys­tic kid­ney dis­ease and al­pha-1-an­tit­rypsin de­fi­cien­cy.

Steer­ing these pro­grams to mar­ket (or some kind of deal) AS­AP is a core part of De Ru­ber­tis’ pitch to the en­tre­pre­neurs be­hind each of the sub­sidiaries that agreed to merge in­to Centes­sa.

As the com­pa­ny wrote in its S-1, the founder-sub­ject mat­ter ex­perts “dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly share in up­side” through mile­stone pay­ments, which would be trig­gered by reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals or cash pro­ceeds from part­ner­ships, out-li­cens­ing deals and/or a sale.

Gre­go­ry Wein­hoff

For his part, Yver has plen­ty of pos­i­tive things to say about this op­er­at­ing mod­el.

“Centes­sa’s as­set-cen­tric mod­el ex­em­pli­fies the very best prac­tices that I have ex­pe­ri­enced and im­ple­ment­ed in the in­dus­try,” he said in a state­ment.

He joins CFO Gre­go­ry Wein­hoff and chief ad­min­is­tra­tive of­fi­cer David Chao in the C-suite, af­ter Mon­cef Slaoui, the for­mer chief of Op­er­a­tion Warp Speed, quit the CSO job fol­low­ing a sex­u­al ha­rass­ment scan­dal that trig­gered his ejec­tion from all biotech posts.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.

Boehringer Ingelheim reported human pharma sales of €18.5 billion on Wednesday, led by type 2 diabetes and heart failure drug Jardiance and pulmonary fibrosis med Ofev. Jardiance sales reached €5.8 billion, growing 39% year over year, while Ofev took in €3.2 billion, notching its own 20.6% annual jump.

However, Boehringer is also looking ahead with its pipeline, estimating “In the next seven years the company expects about 20 regulatory approvals in human pharma.”