4 Life Science CEOs Whose Track Records Make All the Difference
August 2, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
The role of the chief executive officers of successful companies can often be mysterious. Is it their strategic brilliance? Inspiring leadership? The confidence they project to reassure investors and analysts? Or being in the right place at the right time?
The Motley Fool’s Todd Campbell sat down with Kristine Harjes to discuss four chief executives with an interesting track record that are captaining four emerging life science companies.
Lonnie Moulder
CEO, Tesaro
Lonnie Moulder is the chief executive officer of Waltham, Massachusetts-based Tesaro . The company’s recently took a jump from $37.21 on June 27 to today’s price of $93.93. This appeared to be related to a June 29 announcement that the company’s Phase III clinical trial of niraparib met its endpoints of progression-free survival (PFS) in patients with ovarian cancer. Niraparib is an oral, once-daily PARP inhibitor currently in three clinical trials.
Moulder has led the company since its founding in 2010. Prior to that he was vice chairman of the board of directors and president and chief executive officer of Abraxis BioScience. Before that he was vice chairman and executive vice president of Eisai Corporation of North America.
Campbell says that after Moulder sold off a previous company, MGI Pharma , “he stuck around for a little while at that new entity, and then he went off to be the president and CEO of a company called Abraxis BioScience, which shortly thereafter got sold to Celgene for about $2.9 billlion. You start to see a trend—here’s a person who knows how to create value and then knows how to deliver that value to shareholders. Now at Tesaro he seems to be doing it again.”
Patrick Soon-Shiong
CEO, NantHealth
Patrick Soon-Shiong is a little more complicated figure. Often dubbed the “world’s richest doctor,” Soon-Shiong had a number of biotech or life science-related business ventures under his umbrella company, NantWorks. He received his MBBCh medical degree at age 23 from the University Witwatersrand, earned a Master of Science at the University of British Columbia, and undertook surgical training at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he was faculty until 1991, and practiced transplant surgery.
In 1991, he left UCLA and started a biotech firm, which eventually led to APP Pharmaceuticals (APP) in 1997, which sold to Fresenius SE for $3.7 billion in 2008. He later founded Abraxis BioScience, which created Abraxane, used to treat breast, lung, pancreatic and other cancers. He sold Abraxis to Celgene for about $2.9 million. More recently, besides his various companies, he organized a coalition of companies, academics, payers and oncologists as part of The Cancer Moonshot 2020, and The National Immunotherapy Coalition (NIC). The idea is to develop and test therapies for various forms of cancers.
Soon-Shiong may be fairly high profile, but his companies and what they actually do, tend to be low profile. Campbell notes that the company, NantKwest is part of the MoonShot 2020. “It’s an under-the-radar company; not many people are paying attention to it right now, but just because of that I wouldn’t ignore this company. I think it’s definitely one to watch, because Soon-Shiong has said that he plans to have six human clinical trials under way before the end of this year.”
Harjes agrees, saying, “I think this is a great example of a company where management really makes all the difference.” The company itself doesn’t appear all that dazzling, having lost about 80 percent since its July 2015 IPO, but his track record of successfully building companies and selling them profitably makes it a company of interest.
Phillip Frost
CEO, Opko Health
Phillip Frost is the head of Opko Health , headquartered in Miami, Florida. Frost has been the chief executive officer and chairman since March 2007. He was director of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries from January 2006 until February 2015, and was chairman of the board of Teva from March 2010 until Dec. 2014.
On June 21, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the company’s Rayaldee (calcifediol) to treat secondary hypoparathyroidism (SHPT) in adults with stage 3 or 4 chronic kidney disease.
Campbell says, “Phillip Frost is definitely a ‘sum is greater than the parts’ kind of manager. He has made billions of dollars over a lifetime career, 40, 50 years, by cobbling together different companies and then turning some into a big enough piece where he could then sell it to another company. The company that made him probably most well known to investors was Ivax, which he sold to Teva Pharmaceutical for about $7 billion back in 2006. He does have a penchant for going out and being very highly acquisitive. He’s shown that he knows how to navigate the marketplace and to make money for investors.”
Alan Auerbach
CEO, Puma Bio
And finally, Alan Auerbach is the chief executive officer of Puma Bio , headquartered in Los Angeles. On July 21, the company submitted a New Drug Application (NDA) to the FDA for PB272 (neratinib) as adjuvant treatment of early stage HER2-overexpressed/amplified breast cancer.
Auerbach is Puma’s chairman, chief executive and president, which he founded. Before Puma, he was the founder, chief executive officer, president and board memory of Cougar Biotechnology until it was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2009.
Puma’s fortunes have been up and down, largely tied to both the successes of neratinib and its side effects and safety concerns. “However,” Campbell says, “investors may not want to be giving up on Puma at this point, because Auerbach is the person who’s successfully behind the development of the top-selling prostate cancer drugs Zytiga, which now generates out about $2.4 billion in annualized revenue for Johnson & Johnson.”