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.

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision on Friday to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to somewhat reassure women that states will not be able to ban the prescription drug sometimes used for abortions.

Following the decision, the New England Journal of Medicine also published an editorial strongly condemning the reversal, saying it “serves American families poorly, putting their health, safety, finances, and futures at risk.”

The story of Amryt Pharma’s candidate for the genetic skin condition epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, will soon enter another chapter.

After the Irish drugmaker’s candidate, dubbed Oleogel-S10 and marketed as Filsuvez, was handed a CRL earlier this year, the company announced in a press release that it plans to submit a formal dispute resolution request for the company’s NDA for Oleogel-S10.

The first in vivo CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing program has some new durability data showing sustained reduction of a toxic protein in ATTR amyloidosis at all four dose levels in a small 15-patient study.

Intellia Therapeutics presented the much-anticipated data for its Regeneron-collaborated NTLA-2001 Friday morning, adding to the initial Phase I results it first delivered almost a year ago to the day.

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis made a name for himself in the 2020 election cycle as the darling of the pharma industry, accepting hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, even from the likes of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

Those contributions have led Tillis to attempt to re-write patent laws in pharma’s favor, a move which failed to gain steam in 2019, and request for a third time since January that the FDA should help stop “the false narrative that patent protections are to blame for high drug prices.”