August 27, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Dublin-based Malin Corporation announced earlier this week that Kelly Martin will replace Adrian Howd as the company’s chief executive officer. Martin will remain on the board, be responsible for the company’s day-to-day operations, and he will run the company from his home in Connecticut.
Malin is an investment firm that focuses on life sciences companies. It was created earlier this year by executives from the former Irish drug company Elan, including Kelly, who was chief executive officer of Elan from 2003 to 2012.
Martin was previously a banker with Merrill Lynch. Martin’s tenure at Elan was troubled. Many believed he had been brought into the company to eventually sell it. However, what he did do was improve share prices six-fold, at least until 2010, when shares dropped to less than $5 from a high in 2008 of about $35.
“Martin has been very shareholder-friendly when you look at the stock,” an anonymous source told Reuters in 2013. “And he did clean it up, until he started buying things.”
Elan had suffered from an accounting scandal and Martin was hired to clean up the company, which apparently he did. In Aug. 2012, Elan had a major drug failure in a Phase III trial of bapineuzumab for Alzheimer’s disease. It was part of a research and development syndicate with Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson . Martin left the company shortly afterward, but not before engineering a sale of the company.
His tenure at Elan was controversial. Some of the controversy came after layoffs admidst news the company was keeping its private jet contract. More evident was investor complaints about “ineptitude and mismanagement.” The strongest complaints came from Danish investor Ib Sonderby, founder of Zoar Invest, which controlled about two million shares of Elan. He and others also complained that Elan did not clearly reveal the details of its research and development arrangement with Johnson & Johnson.
In 2013, Allegan, Mich.-based Perrigo Company acquired Elan for $8.6 billion. Perrigo shifted its domicile to Ireland for a lower corporate tax rate. It also acquired royalties on Tysabri, a multiple sclerosis drug that Elan developed and sold to Biogen Idec, Inc. earlier in the year.
Adrian Howd, former chief executive officer of Malin, will take on the role of chief investment officer, as well as executive director of the board. Chairman John Given will take on various executive functions. In addition, Malin announced it was investing a minimum of $15 million and up to $20 million into HVP, a life science venture capital firm in North Carolina. It also plans to invest up to $1 million in New York-based Jaan Health, a healthcare mobile tech company.
“Into the next phase, it’s all about the assets. We stepped back and looked at how we can help progress those assets,” said Given to The Irish Times. “We have a world class scientist and analyst in Adrian who is in a unique position to do that and we also have an operational CEO effectively on the bench, Kelly Martin.”
