The $1.1M goodbye: Gilead CSO John McHutchison is out as Daniel O’Day shakes up the senior team

John McHutchison in 2012. Getty Images

July 17, 2019 09:05 AM EDTUpdated 12:05 PM

The $1.1M goodbye: Gilead CSO John McHutchison is out as Daniel O’Day shakes up the senior team

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Just a little more than a year after John McHutchison grabbed a promotion to become CSO at Gilead in the wake of Norbert Bischofberger’s exit, he’s out amid a shakeup of the senior team that is also triggering the departure of two other top execs.

Gilead stated that McHutchison “has decided to step down” from the job as of August 2nd. And their SEC filing notes that he’ll be getting a $1.1 million check to settle up on his contract.

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June 5, 2020 08:24 AM EDT

People

Outsourcing

Drug manufacturing giant Lonza taps Roche/pharma ‘reinvention’ vet as its new CEO

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

June 4, 2020 12:30 PM EDTUpdated 22 hours ago

Deals

Bristol Myers is cleaning up the post-Celgene merger pipeline, and they’re sweeping out an experimental checkpoint in the process

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Back during the lead up to the $74 billion buyout of Celgene, the big biotech’s leadership did a little housecleaning with a major pact it had forged with Jounce. Out went the $2.6 billion deal and a collaboration on ICOS and PD-1.

Celgene, though, also added a $530 million deal — $50 million up front — to get the worldwide rights to JTX-8064, a drug that targets the LILRB2 receptor on macrophages.

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Fangliang Zhang, AP Images

June 5, 2020 11:15 AM EDTUpdated 01:51 PM

IPOs

R&D

UPDATED: Legend fetches $424 million, emerges as biggest winner yet in pandemic IPO boom as shares soar

Jason Mast

Associate Editor

Amid a flurry of splashy pandemic IPOs, a J&J-partnered Chinese biotech has emerged with one of the largest public raises in biotech history.

Legend Biotech, the Nanjing-based CAR-T developer, has raised $424 million on NASDAQ. The biotech had originally filed for a still-hefty $350 million, based on a range of $18-$20, but managed to fetch $23 per share, allowing them to well-eclipse the massive raises from companies like Allogene, Juno, Galapagos, though they’ll still fall a few dollars short of Moderna’s record-setting $600 million raise from 2018.

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ENDPOINTS CAREERS

Process Development Scientist, Compound Management

Recursion Pharmaceuticals

Salt Lake City, UT

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June 5, 2020 10:44 AM EDT

R&D

As it happened: A bidding war for an antibiotic maker in a market that has ravaged its peers

Natalie Grover

Reporter

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

David Meline (file photo)

June 5, 2020 08:52 AM EDT

People

Moderna’s new CFO took a cut in salary to jump to the mRNA revolutionary. But then there’s the rest of the compensation package

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

David Meline took a little off the top of his salary when he jumped from the CFO post at giant Amgen to become the numbers czar at the upstart vaccines revolutionary Moderna. But the SEC filing that goes with a major hire also illustrates how it puts him in line for a fortune — provided the biotech player makes good as a promising game changer.

To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with the base salary: $600,000. Or the up-to 50% annual cash bonus — an industry standard — that comes with it. True, the 62-year-old earned $999,000 at Amgen in 2019, but it’s the stock options that really count in the current market bliss for all things biopharma. And there Meline did well.

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June 5, 2020 06:56 AM EDTUpdated 11:22 AM

Coronavirus

Covid-19 roundup: AbbVie jumps into Covid-19 antibody hunt; AstraZeneca shoots for 2B doses of Oxford vaccine — with $750M from CEPI, Gavi

Natalie Grover

Reporter

Amber Tong

Editor

Jason Mast

Associate Editor

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.

June 3, 2020 08:57 AM EDT

R&D

Is a powerhouse Merck team preparing to leap past Roche — and leave Gilead and Bristol Myers behind — in the race to TIGIT domination?

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Roche caused quite a stir at ASCO with its first look at some positive — but not so impressive — data for their combination of Tecentriq with their anti-TIGIT drug tiragolumab. But some analysts believe that Merck is positioned to make a bid — soon — for the lead in the race to a second-wave combo immuno-oncology approach with its own ambitious early-stage program tied to a dominant Keytruda.

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ENDPOINTS CAREERS

Senior Drug Discovery Scientist

New York, NY

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June 2, 2020 06:00 AM EDTUpdated 07:18 AM

Venture

Pfizer’s Doug Giordano has $500M — and some advice — to offer a certain breed of 'breakthrough' biotech

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

So let’s say you’re running a cutting-edge, clinical-stage biotech, probably public, but not necessarily so, which could see some big advantages teaming up with some marquee researchers, picking up say $50 million to $75 million dollars in a non-threatening minority equity investment that could take you to the next level.

Doug Giordano might have some thoughts on how that could work out.

The SVP of business development at the pharma giant has helped forge a new fund called the Pfizer Breakthrough Growth Initiative. And he has $500 million of Pfizer’s money to put behind 7 to 10 — or so — biotech stocks that fit that general description.

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David Meline, incoming Moderna CFO

June 4, 2020 09:04 AM EDT

People

Amgen vet David Meline finds a new CFO roost at Moderna, taking a ride on the Covid-19 tiger as departing exec cashes out with $12M

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

We found out a few weeks ago that Moderna CFO Lorence Kim isn’t waiting around to see how the biotech wunderkind makes out in its frantic race to field a messenger RNA vaccine that can quell Covid-19. And now we know who’s stepping on board to take his place in the latest move in the executive suite.

David Meline, who forged his rep during a 6-year run at Amgen, slipped out the exit right after his Q2 “retirement” party in California — presumably virtual — and started the next chapter of his career at a biotech company betting big on revolutionizing the vaccine R&D space.

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