Uni­ty Biotech­nol­o­gy is still reel­ing rough­ly four months af­ter ax­ing its lead pro­gram, as it saw sig­nif­i­cant change at the ex­ec­u­tive lev­el Mon­day.

The com­pa­ny an­nounced that ARCH Ven­ture Part­ners’ Bob Nelsen, one of Uni­ty’s co-founders back in 2011, has left the board. In ad­di­tion, pres­i­dent and co-founder Ned David is step­ping down at the end of the year, and an­oth­er board mem­ber, David Lacey, is al­so leav­ing the biotech.

With the de­par­tures, Uni­ty is ap­point­ing Gilmore O’Neill to the board to chair the com­pa­ny’s sci­ence com­mit­tee.

“We are in­cred­i­bly grate­ful to Ned, Bob and Dave for their ser­vice,” chair­man Kei­th Leonard said in a state­ment. “Ned’s ear­ly re­search in­to fun­da­men­tal path­ways of ag­ing bi­ol­o­gy form the foun­da­tion of UNI­TY. Bob played an in­stru­men­tal role in cre­at­ing and shap­ing a com­pa­ny tar­get­ing dis­eases of ag­ing, and David’s drug dis­cov­ery in­sights have shaped our pipeline.”

Mon­day’s moves were not the first de­par­tures since Uni­ty’s lead pro­gram flopped a ma­jor Phase II in os­teoarthri­tis of the knee in Au­gust. That whiff set this re­struc­tur­ing in mo­tion, and Nelsen had long been one of the head­lin­ers in a celebri­ty group of in­vestors that al­so in­clud­ed Jeff Be­zos and Pe­ter Thiel. Uni­ty had raised more than $200 mil­lion over the last decade, hop­ing its big-name part­ners could vault it to the fore­front of the buzzy an­ti-ag­ing field.

The com­pa­ny pre­vi­ous­ly said in Sep­tem­ber it was slash­ing its work­force by 30% in or­der to con­tin­ue its re­fo­cus­ing to­ward oph­thal­mol­o­gy and neu­rol­o­gy, putting the San Fran­cis­co-based biotech on track to em­ploy 75 full-timers by the end of 2020.

Au­gust’s tri­al miss it­self in­volved a 183-per­son study for what was then Uni­ty’s on­ly clin­i­cal pro­gram, UBX0101. Pa­tients in the treat­ment arms showed vir­tu­al­ly no dif­fer­ence com­pared to those tak­ing place­bo, and the can­di­date didn’t even reg­is­ter a dose-de­pen­dent re­sponse.

On­ly pa­tients who re­ceived the low­est dose nu­mer­i­cal­ly out­per­formed the con­trol, but the p-val­ue clocked in at an abysmal p=0.52.

Uni­ty’s big the­o­ry re­volves around what are known as senes­cent cells — non-di­vid­ing cells that clut­ter an ag­ing body. Uni­ty says the buildup in such cells is as­so­ci­at­ed with the re­lease of dozens of pro­teins that pro­mote in­flam­ma­tion, and re­mov­ing them, with­out al­ter­ing the bal­ance of cells the body needs, could pro­mote a longer, health­i­er life.

With the os­teoarthri­tis pro­gram scrapped, Uni­ty is now fo­cus­ing on a dif­fer­ent group of senes­cent cells for eye dis­eases. The next ex­per­i­men­tal drug is UBX1325, which is de­signed to tar­get Bcl-xL. And if all goes ac­cord­ing to plan, Uni­ty ex­pects to dose the first pa­tients in a Phase I study for the can­di­date lat­er this year.

It’s not new for Lonza, the Swiss CDMO nearing its quasquicentennial anniversary, to be in the upper echelon of the biotech manufacturing industry.

But 2020 — as it was for many CDMOs — was a special year even by Lonza’s standards. The company inked a deal to produce 1 billion worldwide doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine and tapped pharma vet Pierre-Alain Ruffieux to lead its operations, moves which have allowed Lonza to make a myriad of other deals that will continue to ramp up its global production capacity.

More than five years after Corey Fishman and Michael Dunne dusted sulopenem off Pfizer’s shelves — the second castoff antibiotic they’ve brought out of the pharma giant — and founded Iterum Therapeutics around that single drug, they have lined up a quick shot at approval with priority review from the FDA.

The decision, six months from now, will mark a make-or-break moment for a struggling biotech that has just enough cash to keep the lights on until the third quarter.

Immunocore spent much of 2019 dealing with the fallout of the Neil Woodford scandal, as the former star investor’s fall crashed the biotech’s valuation out of unicorn range. Now it turns out that the company spent 2020 dealing with another internal scandal.

The longtime UK biotech darling disclosed in their IPO filing last week that they had fallen victim to an alleged kickback scheme involving one of their employees. After a whistleblower came forward, they said in their F-1, they spent the summer and spring investigating, finding fraud on the part of an employee and two outside vendors.

Longtime Vertex CEO Jeffrey Leiden is taking on a new role.

Leiden has been appointed chairman of Tmunity’s board of directors, the company announced Monday. The move comes about a year and a half after Leiden announced he’d be stepping down from his position at Vertex.

Vertex saw immense growth under Leiden, leading the company from its exit out of hepatitis C, when cures were moving in, and into cystic fibrosis. The company’s cystic fibrosis triple combo therapy Trikafta is already its best-seller, reaching the distinction just six weeks after launch and recording the strongest first quarter of sales for any drug, per some estimates.