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.

The FDA on Friday released about 10 million doses of J&J’s vaccine for use, and disposed of another 60 million doses that were manufactured at the now-shuttered Emergent BioSolutions facility in Baltimore where cross-contamination occurred.

The agency said it’s not yet ready to allow the Emergent plant to be included in the J&J EUA, but that may occur soon. FDA came to the decision to authorize some of the doses after reviewing facility records and quality testing results.

It appears that we have reached the end of the saga about the global insider trading ring that collectively reaped $100 million from placing “timely, profitable” trades in biotech stocks like Ariad, Pharmacyclics and Receptos.

Tomer Feingold and Dov Malnik — Israeli traders living in Switzerland — were the last out of eight to be charged as the SEC unraveled the scheme, which ran from 2013 through 2017. Together, according to a statement in March, the pair had pocketed more than $4 million.

Less than 12 hours after revealing a flop on its second shot for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, Vertex plowed ahead with another data drop from its partnership with CRISPR Therapeutics. And though the topline proved positive, concerns over conditioning agents continue to linger over the collaboration, as well as the entire gene therapy space.

Presenting data from two trials at the European Hematology Association annual meeting, the pair announced that follow-up data of at least three months for 22 patients with genetic blood disorders indicated a “consistent and sustained” response to the experimental drug CTX001. All 15 patients with transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia did not need further blood transfusions and all seven with severe sickle cell disease were pain free, the biotechs announced.

Senate Finance Democrats took aim at Biogen’s pricey new Alzheimer’s drug on Thursday, but members on both sides of the aisle at a separate appropriations hearing didn’t question acting FDA commissioner Janet Woodcock on the approval.

“I was appalled that Biogen priced their Alzheimer’s drug approved by the FDA at $56,000 per year — I’m not going to debate whether this is effective or not, but it’s double the household median income for Michiganders over the age of 65,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) said at the finance hearing.