No­var­tis on­col­o­gy chief Bruno St­rig­i­ni is on the way out of the phar­ma gi­ant.

In a brief state­ment No­var­tis point­ed­ly said that St­rig­i­ni had de­cid­ed to re­tire “from No­var­tis and the in­dus­try” for per­son­al rea­sons.

Bruno St­rig­i­ni

The state­ment sug­gests that St­rig­i­ni — a cen­tral fig­ure in one of the lead­ing on­col­o­gy bio­phar­ma groups in the world — won’t be mak­ing the usu­al end run out of one Big Phar­ma and in to a new job. Such moves have be­come rou­tine, es­pe­cial­ly as biotechs and eq­ui­ty stakes beck­on from a thriv­ing sec­tor of the drug de­vel­op­ment world.

No­var­tis has made some big moves in can­cer since hir­ing St­rig­i­ni from a se­nior Mer­ck po­si­tion in the sum­mer of 2014, par­tic­u­lar­ly in its role in spear­head­ing the first CAR-T to hit the mar­ket and in­te­grat­ing GSK’s on­col­o­gy port­fo­lio three years ago. The deal pre­ced­ed St­rig­i­ni’s ar­rival by a few months.

St­rig­i­ni is step­ping out of the ex­ec­u­tive com­mit­tee and then plans an ear­ly-2018 de­par­ture as Narasimhan se­lects a key re­place­ment for his team.

CEO Joe Jimenez, who’s al­so head­ed out of No­var­tis as de­vel­op­ment chief Vas Narasimhan pre­pares to shift to the helm, did the hon­ors.

I’d like to thank Bruno St­rig­i­ni for his con­tri­bu­tions and achieve­ments. He has nav­i­gat­ed the busi­ness unit through the Gleevec patent ex­pi­ra­tion and has led the suc­cess­ful in­te­gra­tion of the GSK On­col­o­gy Prod­uct Port­fo­lio ac­quired in 2015. I wish him the best for his fu­ture.

The European Medicines Agency on Friday rejected Kyowa Kirin’s Parkinson’s disease drug Nouryant (istradefylline), which the US FDA approved in 2019 under the brand name Nourianz.

EMA said it considered that the results of the clinical studies used to support the application “were inconsistent and did not satisfactorily show that Nouryant was effective at reducing the ‘off’ time. Only four out of the eight studies showed a reduction in ‘off’ time, and the effect did not increase with an increased dose of Nouryant.”

→ Back in May, Passage Bio CFO Richard Morris and CMO Gary Romano left within days of each other, but this week the gene therapy player has found their replacements, along with a chief commercial officer. Simona King, a 19-year Bristol Myers Squibb vet in finance, becomes CFO on Aug. 23 after a quick stop in the same post at Tmunity Therapeutics and a year at Emergent BioSolutions. CMO Mark Forman gets started a week from today and was recently VP of translational medicine at Acadia Pharmaceuticals, preceded by 11 years at Merck. And Maria Törnsén, who got the ball rolling as CCO this week, had been Sarepta’s SVP, general manager, US.