Biogen has named its new CEO: while other companies in the biopharma industry are also welcoming new faces to top jobs.
Biogen has appointed Christopher A. Viehbacher as President and CEO and a member of the Board of Directors, effective November 14.
Viehbacher succeeds Michel Vounatsos, whose exit was announced in May and whom has led the company since 2017.
Viehbacher has extensive international experience in both large pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurial biotecs. After 20 years with GlaxoSmithKline, he served as global CEO of Sanofi for six years, during which time the company overcame the loss of exclusivity of most of its portfolio and pivoted to new sources of growth such as Dupixent, which resulted from the partnership with Regeneron, and in rare and specialty medicines following the acquisition of Genzyme. Under Viehbacher’s leadership, Sanofi strengthened and diversified its R&D pipeline and delivered significant value to shareholders.
More recently, Viehbacher and Ernesto Bertarelli co-founded Gurnet Point Capital, a Cambridge-based healthcare investment fund, which has led to the creation and continuing development of many innovative companies. He has also chaired or been a member of the board of a number of entrepreneurial companies in biotechnology.
Viehbacher has always been a strong advocate for innovation and public health: having received a number of awards including the Légion d’Honneur in France.
With 30 clinical programs, 12 of which are in Phase 3 or filed, Biogen is at an ‘important inflection point’ in CNS drug discovery and development.
TAAV Biomanufacturing Solutions, a cGMP manufacturer of doggybone DNA (a synthetic DNA material for AAV gene therapies), has appointed Dolores Baksh, Ph.D. as Chief Executive Officer.
Baksh brings a 20-year track record of biotechnology R&D, product development and cGMP manufacturing leadership to TAAV.
TAAV, an independently operated wholly-owned subsidiary of Asklepios BioPharmaceutical (AskBio), and a member of the Bayer worldwide group of companies, is a cGMP manufacturer of doggybone DNA (a synthetic DNA material for AAV gene therapies), promoting the substance as an alternative to plasmid DNA.
TAAV's facility in San Sebastian, Spain, is specifically designed for the manufacture of high quality dbDNA for research, preclinical and clinical grade AAV therapeutics. The company believes its synthetic process will lead to high yields at small scales and shorter manufacturing timelines, facilitating quicker production of AAV and increasing safety by eliminating residual bacterial sequences of plasmid DNA.
Baksh joins TAAV from Akron Biomanufacturing where she served as the company's Business Unit Head and Vice President of Commercial Biomanufacturing, leading its growth strategy for the production of cGMP plasmids and gene editing nucleases. She also held various leadership positions at GE Healthcare Life Sciences; GE Venture start-up, Vineti, Inc.; Organogenesis; and others. In these roles, Baksh established cell and gene therapy product development strategies through organic and inorganic approaches, brought to market software to scale and digitize cell manufacturing systems and played a leading role in the approval of the first FDA approved allogeneic cell-based product.
Baksh received her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto. She will split her time between Boston, Massachusetts, and TAAV's manufacturing facility in San Sebastian, Spain.
Eversana, a provider of 'next-generation' commercial services to the global life sciences industry, has named Sy Pretorius as the company’s new Chief Operating Officer and President, Outsourced Solutions.
Described as a highly regarded leader in clinical development and commercial operations, Pretorius joins Eversana with more than 25 years of life sciences experience including multiple executive advisory roles, most recently serving as President, Clinical Development and Chief Medical Officer, at Parexel.
He will be responsible for driving operational excellence across the company’s growing outsourced operations including Channel Management, Compliance Services, Field Deployment Solutions and Patient Services, as well as critical infrastructure teams including Information Technology and Business Transformation.
Pretorius joins Eversana as it rapidly expands its global commercialization services. Since its launch in 2018, EVERSANA created the industry’s first fully integrated outsourced service model, from just over 1,000 employees in 2018 to nearly 7,000 today across 16 countries.
Pretorius, a trained physician with master’s degrees in Pharmacology, Business Administration, and Drug Development, is a recognized thought leader across the pharmaceutical industry. He is an honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine (FFPM) in the United Kingdom and teaches drug development at several institutions including Harvard Medical School. He was named to the PharmaVOICE 100 list in 2017.
Seagen's Board of Directors has appointed David R. Epstein as Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors.
Epstein brings more than 30 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, including more than 25 years at Novartis where he built its oncology business unit from initiation to second largest in the world and then served as CEO of Novartis Pharmaceuticals, a division of Novartis AG.
More recently, he was executive partner at Flagship Pioneering, a builder of breakthrough bioplatform companies.
From 2010 to mid-2016 he served as CEO of Novartis Pharmaceuticals, a division of Novartis AG. Previously, David started and led Novartis’ Oncology and Molecular Diagnostic units. Over the course of his career, he led the development and commercialization of over 30 new molecular entities, including major breakthroughs such as Glivec, Tasigna, Gilenya, Cosentyx and Entresto.
Epstein holds a B.S. Degree in Pharmacy from Rutgers University College of Pharmacy and an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.
In addition, Seattle-headquartered Seagen has announced that Roger Dansey, M.D., who has served as Seagen’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO) since 2018 and as Interim CEO since May 2022, has been appointed President, Research and Development.
Before joining Seagen, Dr. Dansey was Therapeutic Area Head for Late-Stage Oncology at Merck & Co., Inc., where he was responsible for registration efforts for Keytruda (pembrolizumab) across multiple tumor types. Earlier in his career, Dr. Dansey was the Vice President of Oncology Clinical Research at Gilead Sciences and the Global Development Lead for Xgeva (denosumab) at Amgen, where he held multiple roles in oncology and hematology.
In this new role, Dr. Dansey will continue to serve as CMO reporting to Epstein.
Seagen is a global biotechnology company that discovers, develops and commercializes cancer medicines.
California Life Sciences (CLS) has announced the winners of its 19th annual Pantheon Awards: celebrating those making scientific advancements in the state and around the globe.
The 2022 Pantheon Award winners are:
- Paul Hastings – Leadership Award
- Ted Love, M.D. – Leadership Award
- Lori Lindburg – Pantheon Award
- Ahmed Muhammad – Elizabeth Schar Inspiring Future Leaders Award
- Twist Bioscience – Synthetic & Ag Bio Award
- SPARK at Stanford Translational Research Program – Academia, Non-Profit, & Research Award
- Coherus Biosciences – Biopharma Award
- RefleXion – Convergent Technologies
- Fauna Bio – Emerging Innovation Award
After the open nomination period, finalists were chosen by the 2022 Pantheon Advisory Committee, and winners were selected through a public voting campaign which received more than 2,000 votes. Winners were announced at the awards ceremony on November 3 in San Francisco.
R. Jude Samulski, Ph.D., AskBio President, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, has received the inaugural European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ESGCT) Founders Award in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the recent ESGCT 29th Congress.
The Founders Award honors Dr. Samulski’s contribution to the development of engineered recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) vectors, which began 40 years ago with the cloning and rescue of infectious AAV from a recombinant plasmid.* This work laid the foundation for subsequent developments of rAAV vectors capable of expressing foreign sequences, thereby enabling the use of AAV-based vectors for the delivery of various therapeutic genes into mammalian cells. The AAV inverted terminal repeat (ITR) sequences are an essential component of every AAV therapeutic drug. This and other breakthroughs made by Dr. Samulski have since contributed to three rAAV-based gene therapies becoming available for patients and many more in various stages of development.
Dr. Samulski has worked with AAV for 40 years, and for 25 years he was director of the University of North Carolina Gene Therapy Center. Dr. Samulski is a former member of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC), a committee tasked with assisting the FDA with gene therapy clinical trial approvals in the U.S. He also frequently serves as a gene therapy consultant to the FDA. In 2008, Dr. Samulski was recognized by the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) with the inaugural Outstanding Achievement Award. He was also invited by Pope Francis to the Vatican in recognition of his work in the treatment of Canavan disease. Dr. Samulski has played an integral role in advancing gene therapies into human clinical trials for hemophilia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, giant axonal neuropathy, Pompe disease, congestive heart failure and others. He is the inventor of nearly 500 patented technologies related to AAV technology.
Founded in 2001, Asklepios BioPharmaceutical, Inc. (AskBio), is now a wholly owned and independently operated subsidiary of Bayer AG, acquired in 2020.
*Samulski RJ, Berns KI, Tan M, Muzyczka N. Cloning of adeno-associated virus into pBR322: rescue of intact virus from the recombinant plasmid in human cells. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1982;79(6):2077-2081. doi:10.1073/pnas.79.6.2077
