Juno Awards CEO and CFO Special Bonuses After Inking $1 Billion Celgene Deal
February 9, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SEATTLE – Juno Therapeutics is continuing a trend it began last year with extra financial bonuses to executives for “exceptional contributions” to the company, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported this morning.
Hans Bishop, Juno’s chief executive officer, was awarded an extra $148,750 in a special bonus and Steven Harr, the company’s chief financial officer, received a special bonus of $112,000, the Journal reported, citing a 2015 end-of-year report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Those additional bonuses were on top of Bishop and Harr’s annual bonuses. When adding the special bonus to his regular bonus, Bishop took home bonuses totaling $425,000—which is equal to his annual salary. Harr’s total bonuses, including the special bonus, was $320,000, the Journal reported. While Bishop’s salary may seem small in comparison to other pharmaceutical CEOs, the majority of his worth is in the form of Juno stock. At the end of 2014, Bishop’s pay package, which included stock options, salary and restricted shares, was valued at $88 million, the Journal noted. Juno’s stock is down slightly this morning, currently trading at $26.34 per share. The stock saw a spike in June, hitting a high of $69.28 per share following the company striking a $1 billion collaborative deal.
Washington-based Juno Therapeutics had a strong year that included striking a 10-year $1 billion collaborative agreementwith Celgene Corporation to leverage T cell therapeutic strategies. The collaboration will have with an initial focus on Chimeric Antigen Receptor Technology (CAR-T) and T Cell Receptor (TCR) technologies.
To help foster its CAR-T therapies, in November Juno snapped up Robert Azelby, a key executive at Amgen Biologics to serve as executive vice president and chief commercial officer. While at Amgen , Azelby oversaw that company’s oncology business unit representing over $6 billion in annual revenue with over 600 sales and marketing personnel. Since taking over leadership in May 2012, Azelby grew the business to be the second largest oncology division in the U.S., Juno said in its statement.
The company is continuing its momentum into 2016 with the recent $125 million acquisition of privately-held Harvard spinout AbVitro and its gene sequencing platform to develop engineered T cells.
Juno is developing cell-based cancer immunotherapies based on chimeric antigen receptor and high-affinity T cell receptor technologies to genetically engineer T cells to recognize and kill cancer. In July, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Juno’s Investigational New Drug application for JCAR015 for treatment of adult patients with relapsed/refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which will allow the company to initiate Phase II clinical trials. CAR T therapies appear to be particularly effective for leukemia and other blood cancers, with some researchers going so far as to call them cures. Studies have shown these treatments to eliminate all evidence of leukemia and lymphoma in anywhere from 40 percent to 90 percent of patients.
Juno was spun out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and has partnerships with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle Children's Research Institute.
In 2014, Juno was named the most promising biopharma startup.
"This recognition is testament to how hard we are working to bring transformative cancer therapies to market. Being named the most promising biopharma startup speaks to the milestones we have achieved in less than a year, including two funding rounds and significant progress in clinical development. It has been an exciting year, but we are even more excited about the progress still to come," Hans Bishop, chief executive officer of Juno Therapeutics, Inc., told BioSpace .