The oth­er shoe has dropped at Ada­gio.

David Her­ing

On Wednes­day evening, the com­pa­ny put out a re­lease say­ing that found­ing CEO Till­man Gern­gross, a high pro­file fig­ure in the an­ti­body world, had re­signed — con­firm­ing an ear­li­er SEC fil­ing that he had agreed to leave. In his place, the board ap­point­ed COO David Her­ing to the in­ter­im CEO job, while launch­ing a search for a new chief.

The board went on to praise Gern­gross for cre­at­ing a strong foun­da­tion at the com­pa­ny, which in­cludes a cush­ion of cash af­ter rais­ing more than $800 mil­lion in a lit­tle more than a year while tak­ing the com­pa­ny pub­lic $AD­GI.

René Rus­so

Gern­gross’ ex­it, though, comes af­ter some con­flict­ing mes­sages on the ef­fi­ca­cy of their an­ti­body against the Covid-19 Omi­cron vari­ant. The stock price was flat­tened by a cut of the da­ta which showed a dra­mat­ic col­lapse in ef­fi­ca­cy, fol­lowed by as­ser­tions that they had a drug that was just as ef­fec­tive as the best avail­able al­ter­na­tive.

At that point, though, in­vestors had bailed and Ada­gio’s multi­bil­lion-dol­lar mar­ket cap — stoked by high ex­pec­ta­tions — had shriv­eled to a frac­tion of its peak. Gern­gross’ abrupt de­par­ture did noth­ing to in­crease con­fi­dence in the com­pa­ny, but it still has a mar­ket cap of $687 mil­lion.

René Rus­so,  the co-founder and chair­man of Ada­gio and a long­time as­so­ciate of Gern­gross’, plans to car­ry on in the face of some ex­treme ad­ver­si­ty. She not­ed:

I am con­fi­dent in the fu­ture of ADG20 and our pipeline of in­no­v­a­tive an­ti­body-based ther­a­pies and pleased to help lead Ada­gio in­to this next chap­ter as a com­pa­ny. We look for­ward to eval­u­at­ing da­ta from our EVADE and STAMP clin­i­cal tri­als to as­sess the op­ti­mal path for­ward for ADG20.

Ada­gio is a spin­out of Adimab, the an­ti­body com­pa­ny Gern­gross found­ed in 2007. And Adimab had a large chunk of the eq­ui­ty when Ada­gio went pub­lic.

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Sanofi chief executive Paul Hudson told investors earlier this year that the Big Pharma was going to emphasize its sales kingpin Dupixent moving forward.

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Sanofi and Regeneron, who jointly work on Dupixent development and commercialization, announced the new development on Thursday, saying that the FDA gave the all-clear to Dupixent to treat patients with prurigo nodularis, a rare autoimmune disorder characterized by a persistent, severe itch — and also visualized by hard, extremely itchy bumps known as nodules that form on the skin. The FDA noted in its announcement that it is the agency’s first approval for the disease.

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The pharma giant on Wednesday provided an update on what it called a “large-scale, sophisticated counterfeiting conspiracy,” accusing two new defendants of “leading and orchestrating” a scheme to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in illegitimate drugs posing as meds such as Biktarvy and Descovy.