By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Basel, Switzerland-based Novartis AG announced that Harvard researcher James “Jay” Bradner will replace Mark Fishman as the head of the company’s Institutes for Biomedical Research starting on Mar. 1, 2016.
Bradner, 43 years old, is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is well known for a TED Talk he gave in October 2011 on open-source cancer research. A part of what he discussed in the talk was his laboratory’s decision to essentially reveal the formula for a promising molecule.
In the talk, Bradner said, “What would a drug company do at that point? Well, they probably would keep this a secret. We did just the opposite. We gave the world the chemical identity of this molecule.”
Presumably Novartis isn’t hiring Bradner entirely on the idea that he’ll open the doors to their proprietary pipeline library. He has helped launch several start-ups based on his laboratory’s work, so he has a mix of scientific and business experience.
In addition, analysts think that Bradner will help fill in some gaps in how the company works, especially in some areas where they’ve notably missed some opportunities. Novartis has been a leader in CAR-T therapy,” one of the hottest areas of immuno-oncology treatments, but have been sorely lacking on CAR-T therapy’s key combination approach, checkpoint inhibitors. While CAR-T therapy stimulates the immune system to hunt down and kill cancer cells, checkpoint inhibitors shut off cancer cells’ ability to hide from those cells. “They completely missed the boat,” Michael Nawrath, an analyst with Zuercher Kantonalbank told Reuters. “Jay Bradner may come from Dana-Farber, but his pedigree is that of somebody who knows how you take new scientific developments and commercialize them, and how you collaborate.”
In his new role, Bradner will manage 6,000 doctors, researchers and staff in the U.S., Switzerland and Asia. Fishman, a cardiologist, who Bradner will replace, was paid about $8 million annually and will be retiring from the research center based in Cambridge.
Fishman is noted for shifting Novartis’s approach from high-throughput screening, essentially throwing as many potential drug compounds at a target and seeing what works, to a more focused approach of understanding the disease in order to arrow in on potential treatments.
Despite its work with CAR-T therapy, Novartis has lagged behind its competitors at Merck & Co. , Bristol-Myers Squibb and Roche .
“If he’s controversial, questioning what ‘Big Pharma’ does, then all the better,” Fabian Wenner, an analyst with Kepler Cheuvreux, told Reuters. “That can only benefit Novartis going into the next decade where we’re going to be looking at much more concentrated payer power and pricing pressures.”
In October, Novartis acquired Admune Therapeutics and signed licensing agreements with Palobiofarma and XOMA Corporation , strengthening its position in immuno-oncology. Admune, located in Danvers, Mass., focuses on cytokine cancer therapies. As part of the acquisition, Novartis picked up its IL-15 agonist program, currently in Phase I clinical trials for metastatic cancer.
Palobiofarma, headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, works on modulating adenosine receptors. It has PBF-509 in Phase I trials for non-small cell lung cancer. XOMA, located in Berkeley, Calif., develops therapeutic antibodies. The deal with Novartis gave the Swiss company the rights to develop and commercialize XOMA’s TGF-beta antibody programs.
Bradford wrote in a 2012 Atlantic Monthly article, that drug discovery was “a dark art performed behind closed doors with the shades pulled.”
Clearly Novartis is doubling down on immuno-oncology. It will be interesting to see if Bradford will shed some light on the dark art.
