March 21, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – As Alnylam’s fortunes fell in 2016, Chief Executive Officer John Maraganore also took a hit to the pocketbook. His total compensation for the year fell about 80 percent, from $8.3 million to $1.7 million, the Boston Business Journal reported this morning.
Maraganore’s loss of pay was driven primarily by a steep drop in his option awards, from $7.1 million to about $621,000 in 2016, the Journal said, citing a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the report, Maraganore exercised options in 2016 to realize approximately $4.9 million in value. In 2015, he realized almost $11.7 million in value through option exercises.
The CEO wasn’t the only Alnylam executive to take a hit on compensation. Two other members of the leadership team, company president Barry Greene and Akshay Vaishnaw, the head of research and development, also saw losses. Greene’s compensation fell from $5.3 million to $1.4 million and Vaishnaw’s dropped from $4.1 million to $1.5 million, the Journal reported.
The company said the changes in compensation for the leaders “was made to support our team strategy, retain key executive officers and provide long-term incentives to support our growth, while remaining within aggregate equity issuance parameters authorized by our compensation committee,” according to the Journal.
The decline in fortune and market share at Alnylam can be traced back to the company’s October 2016 decision to discontinue development of revusiran for hereditary ATTR amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy (hATTR-CM). The company terminated the program after disclosing 19 patients died during the trial. Of those deaths, 16 were receiving revusiran, the company said on Oct. 5. Following that announcement, share prices plunged by more than half, falling from $70.30 to a low of $31.41. Shares prices have climbed back up some to $59.71 this morning.
Alnylam is developing therapeutics using RNA interference (RNAi) technology. RNA interference is a natural mechanism of gene silencing. Much of the interest in RNAi is based on the fact that the RNAi mechanism operates upstream of protein production by silencing the mRNA that codes for such proteins, thereby preventing the disease-causing proteins from being made in the first place. By way of analogy, the RNAi approach is akin to “stopping a flood by turning off the faucet” as compared with today’s medicines that simply “mop up the floor,” Maraganore told BioSpace in an interview last year before the plug was pulled on the trial.
Alnylam saw something of a rebound in November when Sanofi Genzyme forged a partnership with the company to co-develop fitusiran, an investigational RNAi therapeutic for the treatment of hemophilia and rare bleeding disorders. In December, the companies announced positive interim results from an ongoing Phase I fitusiran trial that showed “once-monthly subcutaneous administration of fitusiran achieved lowering of AT and increases in thrombin generation, resulting in a median estimated annualized bleeding rate (ABR) of zero in patients with hemophilia A or B with inhibitors (N=16).” In February, the company provided updated data that showed breakthrough bleeds were effectively managed with replacement factors or bypassing agents, with no thromboembolic events.
