→ Professional sports teams cycle through free agency every year, and core veterans from championship clubs routinely splinter off in different directions. In a similar vein, Merck in particular has seen widespread turnover with its own nucleus of talent that helped Keytruda become one of the biggest blockbusters in the industry, whether it’s CEO Ken Frazier passing the baton to Rob Davis or chief marketing officer Mike Nally taking the helm at Flagship’s Generate Biomedicines. Another big name at the pharma giant, Merck Research Laboratories CMO Roy Baynes, has decided to move on himself — and he’ll be back with an old teammate.

→ Raising more than a few eyebrows across the industry, Josh Smiley has turned up as Zai Lab’s choice for COO effective Aug. 1, resetting his career in short order after getting canned at Eli Lilly last February. The ex-CFO, who spent more than 25 years at Lilly, had engaged in an “inappropriate personal relationship” with an employee and “consensual though inappropriate personal communications” with other staffers, according to an investigation. Lilly summarily appointed Anat Ashkenazi, who’s been with the company since 2001, as Smiley’s replacement.

→ Centessa looked to Daiichi Sankyo to fill the CMO post with Antoine Yver back in May 2021, and now that Yver has garnered a new title, why mess with a good thing?

Yver has been installed as chairman of development, and Centessa is going back to the Enhertu well again by appointing Javad Shahidi as CMO. While Yver was head of oncology R&D at Daiichi Sankyo, Shahidi was the global team leader for Enhertu at the AstraZeneca partner. “I look forward to working with Javad again as we continue to grow Centessa with this incredible portfolio of assets and come closer to bringing impactful new medicines to patients,” Yver said in a statement.

For Kieran English, the newest member of GV’s life sciences unit, life has finally come full circle.

The investment arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Inc. formally announced English’s appointment to GV this morning, after she officially started a few weeks ago on Jan. 28 — the next chapter of a two-plus decade-long career largely spent in management consulting and recruiting. With GV, she’ll try to apply her recruitment and team-building background, focusing on building relationships.

As market volatility sweeps through the landscape, CEO changes are really ramping up, and topping the list is Tillman Gerngross, a force in the antibody space who hitched his wagon to finding another Covid-19 solution by co-founding Adagio Therapeutics. With big investors backing him, the big dreams sputtered when ADG20 proved less effective against Omicron in December. Gerngross has now resigned as CEO, handing things over to COO David Hering on an interim basis until a permanent successor is named. No stranger to the Covid vaccine fight, Hering was poached from his role as global mRNA business lead of Pfizer in July 2021.

After decades in the biopharma industry, Paul Reider is now in his first C-suite role as chief commercial officer. While he has been at Coherus BioSciences since last year, he officially started his new job on Jan. 1, and it was publicly announced on Tuesday.

The appointment will place Reider right in the thicket of the biggest issues in cancer drug development. Long a player in the biosimilar world, Coherus spent $150 million last year to license a PD-1 from Shanghai’s Junshi Biosciences, joining up to three other major US companies that promised to undercut the high-priced market for PD-1 inhibitors by bringing in Chinese drugs and selling them well below the price of Keytruda or Opdivo.

Vir Biotechnology is getting another Biogen vet to join up as the startup’s new global CBO and EVP.

While Johanna Friedl-Naderer officially doesn’t start her first C-suite role for another few weeks on March 2, she will join the company in the midst of conflicting data regarding its GlaxoSmithKline-partnered Covid-19 antibody, and armed with decades of working at the recently-embroiled Biogen.

“I fully recognize that cell therapy is still all about the cells.”

In moving over to his second CSO job, Gary Lee says he hopes to grasp a “really critical” missing piece of the puzzle in cell therapy: T cell biology, something he hadn’t gotten a lot of exposure to. At Lyell Immunopharma, he will have an abundance of scientific knowledge and technologies at his disposal to figure out how to make the best cells possible.