The AAV pullback comes amid Biogen’s aggressive cost-cutting campaign, which put some 1,000 jobs on the chopping block with the goal of generating $1 billion in savings by 2025.
Biogen has completely discontinued work on adeno-associated virus-based gene therapies, setting off a staff reshuffle within the unit.
All told, around 20 employees were affected by this restructuring effort, a spokesperson told Endpoints News, which broke the news on Thursday. “A majority” of these, however, were “reassigned to other roles within Biogen,” the spokesperson added. It is unclear how many were left without jobs.
At the end of 2024, Biogen had more than 7,600 employees worldwide, though the company in January let go of an undisclosed number of research staff in an effort to “reinvigorate” its drug discovery efforts, a spokesperson said at the time.
“We are taking a disciplined approach to capital allocation,” Jane Grogan, head of research at Biogen, told Fierce Biotech on Friday, adding that moving forward, the company will focus its resources into “pioneer modalities” and therapies that are most likely to deliver “better outcomes for patients.”
Grogan was appointed as Biogen’s head of research in October 2023, amid a sweeping cost-cutting initiative. Initiated in July that same year, the restructuring plan put around 1,000 jobs on the chopping block, with the goal of generating $1 billion in savings “by 2025.” At $137 each, Biogen shares have dropped 50% over the last five years as investors grow increasingly skeptical over the company’s commercial and pipeline prospects.
With its AAV pullback last week, Biogen follows in the footsteps of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which in May similarly announced that it would end work on AAV capsids. Vertex in February also terminated a gene editing agreement with Verve Therapeutics, under which the companies were supposed to focus on liver diseases.
Also a blow to the AAV platform is the recent controversy surrounding Sarepta Therapeutics’ gene therapies. This year, the biotech reported three deaths: two associated with its Duchenne muscular dystrophy therapy Elevidys, and one linked to an investigational gene therapy for limb-girdle muscular dystrophy. Both products leveraged Sarepta’s AAV gene therapy platform, and all three deaths were attributed to liver failure.
Still, many drugmakers believe in the promise of AAVs. In an interview with BioSpace last month, Ultragenyx CEO Emil Kakkis said the biotech has been successful in testing AAV gene therapies in various conditions such as Wilson disease and Sanfilippo syndrome, seeing “no safety issues.”
“I think AAVs are a very safe way to deliver DNA to the liver,” he said. “With continued improvement in AAV technology, it’ll be around for a very long time.”
