Mak­ing the leap from a mid-sized biotech in­to the ranks of phar­ma can be a chaf­ing ex­pe­ri­ence for ex­ec­u­tives used to a more flex­i­ble work en­vi­ron­ment — and that jump gets even hard­er dur­ing an ac­qui­si­tion. For Thorsten Graef, a clin­i­cal vet­er­an who tran­si­tioned from Phar­ma­cyclics in­to Ab­b­Vie, the move was a learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence in terms of what sort of team he want­ed to run.

Now, he’s get­ting his chance.

Graef, for­mer­ly Ab­b­Vie’s head of ear­ly on­col­o­gy de­vel­op­ment, has leapt over to NK cell play­er Ace­po­dia to helm the small team’s clin­i­cal pro­gram as it walks its lead drug through ear­ly hu­man tests, Ace­po­dia said Tues­day.

Graef comes aboard af­ter two years at Ab­b­Vie prop­er pre­ced­ed by near­ly sev­en years at Phar­ma­cyclics, the mak­er of blood can­cer med Im­bru­vi­ca, which the Illi­nois drug gi­ant ac­quired for $21 bil­lion back in 2015. Graef had just as­sumed the head of clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment role in De­cem­ber 2014 when Ab­b­Vie pounced and watched the Phar­ma­cyclics team grow from about 80 em­ploy­ees in­to a com­mer­cial out­fit that op­er­at­ed in­de­pen­dent­ly from the Ab­b­Vie borg but has since been ful­ly con­sumed.

Mak­ing that tran­si­tion in­to a role at a glob­al drug­mak­er was a tough one for Graef, who longed for the op­por­tu­ni­ty to build and lead his own clin­i­cal team. In Ace­po­dia, Graef, who sports more than 20 years of ex­pe­ri­ence in the clin­ic, saw an op­por­tu­ni­ty to get in ear­ly on ex­cit­ing sci­ence and shape a con­stant­ly grow­ing clin­i­cal team in his own im­age.

“As a drug de­vel­op­er, hav­ing the chance to be one of the first and hav­ing the chance to take this com­pa­ny through mid- to long-term mile­stones was very ap­peal­ing,” Graef said.

Ace­po­dia comes with an ex­cit­ing — if com­plex — tech plat­form, con­ju­gat­ing an­ti­bod­ies with off-the-shelf nat­ur­al killer cells to of­fer a new path to crack­ing tu­mor cells. The biotech’s lead pro­gram, dubbed ACE1702, is cur­rent­ly in a Phase I study tar­get­ing HER2-ex­press­ing sol­id tu­mors. The first pa­tient was dosed last Au­gust, and topline da­ta are ex­pect­ed at this year’s ES­MO.

Mean­while, the drug­mak­er has three oth­er can­di­dates at the pre­clin­i­cal stage with hopes to take those over the thresh­old in­to hu­mans in the com­ing years. Next week, Ace­po­dia will of­fi­cial­ly un­veil its next two lead can­di­dates, an­oth­er NK-line can­di­date and a donor-de­rived, gam­ma delta T cell prod­uct, at an up­com­ing cell ther­a­py meet­ing, adding even more stakes to the com­pa­ny’s grow­ing port­fo­lio. For Graef, that means rapid­ly scal­ing up a clin­i­cal team to han­dle those projects as well as be­ing pre­pared for what else comes through the pipeline.

“Build­ing a team is more work, but it’s al­so more in­ter­est­ing work,” Graef said. “Par­tic­u­lar­ly in this field, there’s a lot of in­ter­est. There’s al­ready some good clin­i­cal set up and a good foun­da­tion. Ide­al­ly, you want to have some peo­ple with some pas­sion and cre­ate a mix of new­com­ers to the in­dus­try who are re­al­ly ex­cit­ed and fill that out with peo­ple who have some in­dus­try skills.”

Mean­while, Ace­po­dia, which has of­fices in both San Ma­teo, CA, and Tai­wan, has been flesh­ing out the rest of its C-suite in an­tic­i­pa­tion of more tri­als. In con­junc­tion with Graef’s hire, the team added Michael Brock as chief strat­e­gy of­fi­cer. Brock comes with 20 years of strate­gic health­care in­vest­ment bank­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, in­clud­ing a 10-year stint as a man­ag­ing di­rec­tor in Wells Far­go Se­cu­ri­ties’ Health­care In­vest­ment Bank­ing group.

The com­pa­ny re­cent­ly an­nounced the hires of Jim­my Lai as chief fi­nan­cial of­fi­cer and Ani­ta Kawa­tra as an ad­vi­sor on cor­po­rate af­fairs.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

We now know where Roche’s ex-pharma chief Bill Anderson is going.

German pharma giant Bayer announced Wednesday that Anderson will be taking on the role as CEO, less than six weeks after Anderson stepped down from his perch at Roche as head of the group’s pharmaceutical division.

Roche announced back in December that Anderson would depart on Dec. 31 to “pursue opportunities outside of Roche.” His replacement, Genentech vet and Roche’s current head of global product strategy, Teresa Graham, will start her role in March.

As talk of AI this-and-that gobbles up headline after headline, one Big Pharma is losing its AI leader as she transitions to another drug giant: Iya Khalil will trade in her hat as Novartis’ go-to expert and leader in the space for Merck as VP and head of data, AI and genome sciences next week.

After nearly three years leading the artificial intelligence team at Novartis — as Big Pharma and biotechs alike latch onto the ripening AI-for-drug-discovery mode of operation — Khalil will switch employers to head up a similar post at Merck, where she’ll work out of Cambridge, MA beginning Feb. 13, the company tells Endpoints News.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.