Elinzanetant

Good morning and rabbit rabbit as we begin the month of March. It was another busy week in the world of biopharma so let’s jump straight into the headlines. John Carroll examined the last year in biotech investing, putting together his list of the top 100 VCs. There are some familiar names at the top and some handy-dandy charts that help take a snapshot of the industry. Our DC team was also firing on all cylinders again this week, writing about the cancellation of a vaccine advisory meeting for flu shots and Pfizer hiring a former top FDA official. Senior correspondent Andrew Dunn also examined how the tenure of Bayer CEO Bill Anderson has gone so far since he joined the company in 2023. There’s likely a long road ahead, but perhaps Bayer has something in common with skateboarding? Find out below. Elsewhere in the industry, Pfizer said it would start testing combinations of the ADCs it got from Seagen with Summit’s lead drug, and Roger Perlmutter returned to the forefront of biopharma with another fundraise for Eikon — though it represents a down round from its last raise. — Max Gelman A look at the top 100 biotech investors 💯 Founding editor John Carroll took an in-depth look at the biggest names investing in biotech these days, with help from DealForma’s Chris Dokomajilar. As John describes it, the list is “bird’s-eye view of virtually the entire who’s-who in venture investing.” Atop the list is a name that won’t surprise many: RA Capital Management. The firm is a consistent presence in the life sciences space, and it participated in nearly 50 fundraising rounds last year. The top five were rounded out by Novo Holdings/Novo Nordisk Foundation, GV (Google Ventures), Orbimed and Qiming Venture Partners. For the first time since 2021, venture investing rose year over year. Last year saw more than 2,600 investment firms participate in nearly 1,200 life sciences venture rounds, putting a total of $49.3 billion into the space after $40.1 billion was invested in 2023. More than half of last year’s total — $27.3 billion — was directed toward biopharma therapeutics and platforms, up from $22.9 billion in 2023. Another big takeaway? Rounds got bigger, but firms invested primarily in fewer and later fundraises. Even though there was more cash flowing, the total number of rounds fell slightly. In the biopharma space, this figure dropped from 468 in 2023, to 434 last year. At the same time, companies are also staying private longer: the investment in Phase 3 biopharma more than doubled from 2023 to 2024. John also hosted a webinar discussing the list with partners at Andreessen Horowitz, Orbimed, RA Capital and ARCH. You can watch the event on demand here . FDA vaccine meeting is canceled, and some staff return 💉 A meeting of the FDA’s advisors to select flu strains for next fall’s vaccines has been canceled, Endpoints News’ Max Bayer reported this week . The session was scheduled to take place on March 13. While it wasn’t immediately clear if HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had any role in the cancellation, his ascension has raised concerns about how US policy on vaccinations could be affected. What does that mean for flu season? The panel typically meets at the start of the year to give drugmakers time to ramp up production of tens of millions of vaccine doses. A spokesperson for HHS told Endpoints that the FDA “will make public its recommendations to manufacturers in time for updated vaccines to be available for the 2025-2026 influenza season.” 🗣️ What are pharma execs saying about the Trump transition? Few details have emerged from a closed-door White House meeting with pharma CEOs. Meanwhile, executives are sticking mostly to Trump-friendly topics in their public comments, Endpoints’ Andrew Dunn wrote this week in a Post-Hoc piece. Meanwhile, Pfizer hired former CDER director Patrizia Cavazzoni as its new chief medical officer. Cavazzoni, who oversaw drug regulation under the Biden administration, will be in charge of Pfizer’s “regulatory, pharmacovigilance, safety, epidemiology, and medical information and evidence generation,” according to an internal memo. And some staffers returned to the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health after being laid off. Industry-funded medical device reviewers were among those returning, Zachary Brennan reported on Monday. HHS, FDA and CDRH did not immediately respond to requests for comment on how many employees were reinstated or why they were initially laid off. Can Bill Anderson save Bayer? 🐻 CEO Bill Anderson is bringing a new work philosophy to Bayer. Anderson left Roche in 2023, and will celebrate his two-year anniversary as CEO of Bayer in June. He sat down with Endpoints’ Andrew Dunn to talk about his roadmap for Bayer’s turnaround. And while the company still has a long road ahead, fourth-quarter earnings next week should provide a glimpse of how Anderson’s plan is going. What do Bayer and a skateboard injury have in common? Last year, Anderson compared the company to his leg after a 2021 skateboarding accident: “badly broken in four places.” Bayer’s “four breaks” were lapsing patents on key drugs without a sufficient pipeline, high debt, litigation fallout, and a bureaucracy preventing people from doing their best work, he said. Since then, Anderson said Bayer has made “good progress,” and implemented a new structure that eliminates layers of management and leaves smaller teams with more decision-making power. ​​“A great molecule trumps everything,” Anderson said, highlighting that good drugs lead the way. “The molecule makes the franchise, not the other way around.” Bayer has touted five positive Phase 3 readouts in 2024 for drugs including the chronic kidney disease therapy Kerendia, the prostate cancer treatment Nubeqa, and an experimental compound for menopause called elinzanetant. Pfizer wants a piece of Keytruda’s pie 🥧 Pfizer has faced a lot of pressure in recent months, seeing an activist investor join, spinning out multiple businesses and reeling from a few M&A mishaps. But thanks to its acquisition of Seagen, it is attempting to help Summit Therapeutics’ quest to dethrone Merck’s Keytruda as the immunotherapy of choice: Pfizer and Summit said this week they’re going to test Seagen’s vedotin-based ADCs in combination with Summit’s ivonescimab , a PD-1xVEGF bispecific partnered with Akeso. Pfizer and Summit did not disclose terms of the deal, and they didn’t say whether they’d be pitting the combinations directly against Keytruda in clinical trials. But oncology has been a big goal for Pfizer since it bought Seagen, promoting its oncology head to chief scientific officer last fall. Summit CEO Bob Duggan also said Pfizer won’t be the only partner it enlists to develop other potential combos. Eikon Therapeutics raises $351M Series D 💰 Eikon Therapeutics raised a new round as its lead drug enters late-stage testing. The candidate, a TLR7/8 co-agonist called EIK1001, just started a Phase 3 trial for skin cancer. The financing round is the biotech industry’s second largest raise in 2025, behind Verdiva Bio’s $411 million launch in January. A sign of the times: Eikon and its investors agreed to cut the company’s valuation from its 2023 round “to reflect this environment,” CEO Roger Perlmutter told Endpoints. Perlmutter said he is “confident” Eikon will eventually go public, adding that “there is room for special companies to go public, and we are a special company.” DON’T MISS

Something changed for Bill Anderson when he turned 50. He was ascending the ranks of Roche’s Genentech, but the Texas native felt like he was stuck in the same loop year after year. The company would conduct employee surveys that would bring back tepid results, spurring management to vow to improve work processes. It would roll out initiatives with names like “Bureaucracy Buster,” Anderson said, and then the cycle would repeat the following year. Anderson compared the experience to “Groundhog Day,” the 1993 comedy in which Bill Murray’s character relives the same day, over and over. “After 20 years of that, I turned 50 and I literally said, ‘I’m not going to keep doing this,’” Anderson said. “There’s either got to be a better way, or I’m going to do something else. I’ll go do a startup. I’ll go teach. I’m not going to just turn the corporate crank anymore.” Now 58, Anderson finds himself in a different world today. He left Roche in 2023 to take one of the most difficult jobs in the corporate world — leading Bayer, the German conglomerate with mountains of debt and massive lawsuits stemming from its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto. The pharma business relied on aging blockbusters like Xarelto and Eylea, and its pipeline was thin. The stock price was grim, falling over 80% over the past decade and down 59% since Anderson started. Fellow countrymates BioNTech and Merck KGaA are both now more valuable than Bayer, a storied German brand. The silver lining of all that tumult is the chance to try something new. Long frustrated by bureaucracy, Anderson now gets the chance to break the cycle and develop a new way of running a large drugmaker. While there are signs of promise, a long road lies ahead for Bayer’s turnaround. Anderson’s two-year anniversary as CEO is in June. And next week, when Bayer shares its fourth-quarter earnings results, it will provide the latest look into how Anderson’s plan is going and if investors buy that he can save Bayer. On the tail end of a 17-stop, monthslong road trip, Anderson sat down with Endpoints News this month in midtown Manhattan. Sipping a mint tea in a black blazer over a patterned T-shirt, he speaks with the slightest hint of southern twang from growing up in Lake Jackson, TX, offset by decades of globetrotting. He is a straight shooter in assessing Bayer. A year ago, he likened the company to his own gruesome leg injury. He fell off a skateboard one Sunday morning in June 2021, shattering his right femur in four places. That was basically Bayer, he told investors and Wall Street analysts in March 2024. “We’re a high-impact, mission-driven company with three great businesses,” Anderson said, referring to its pharma, consumer health, and agriculture units. “But we’re also badly broken in four places.” Bayer’s “four breaks” were lapsing patents on key drugs without a sufficient pipeline, high debt, litigation fallout, and a bureaucracy preventing people from doing their best work, Anderson said. For his broken femur, Anderson spent 11 nights recovering in the hospital and a year in physical therapy. A year after making those comments, Anderson said Bayer has made “good progress,” though it’s still in the earlier stages of the turnaround. The pipeline is being replenished, fueled by five positive Phase 3 readouts in 2024 for key drugs like the chronic kidney disease therapy Kerendia , the prostate cancer treatment Nubeqa , and an experimental compound for menopause called elinzanetant . There were no negative Phase 3 readouts in 2024, Anderson added. The debt is being paid down, and Anderson is dedicating much of his time to trying to contain the legal liabilities. Bayer has already paid over $10 billion to settle tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming the Roundup weedkiller causes cancer, but tens of thousands of suits are still pending. “If we don’t fix that, we don’t have a future,” Anderson said. Since Anderson’s Groundhog Day moment eight years ago, he has formed his own philosophy for running a large company. It’s called Dynamic Shared Ownership. That sounds a lot like corporate jargon, but Anderson insists it’s fundamentally different. In a nutshell, DSO eliminates layers of management and leaves smaller teams with more decision-making power. These teams set their own measurable goals for 90-day cycles and can borrow talent from other teams. He found inspiration outside the drug industry. One of his favorite examples is Buurtzorg Nederland, a Dutch home-care organization founded by nurses in 2006. Buurtzorg now has over 16,000 employees with an administrative office of less than 100 workers and only two directors. It relies on small, self-managed teams of nurses to make most decisions. “I don’t really believe in the concept of the professional manager,” Anderson said. “We got to get the whole organization into a lean, mean fighting machine instead of an old corporate bureaucracy.” The DSO rollout is nowhere near as dramatic an idea as Buurtzorg, but it is reshaping Bayer. The US pharma unit, for instance, has reduced the number of managers by 40% under the new system, according to the company. Bayer has reduced its workforce by about 5,500 full-time employees in the first nine months of 2024. And, symbolically, Anderson replaced a 1,362-page rule book with a 14-page code of conduct. The moves are not without challenge, heightened by Anderson’s status of coming into Bayer as its first American CEO and pushing for radical change. German labor laws of codetermination, which give a legal right to employees to participate in company decisions, mean he must align with powerful works councils that represent employees. Brent Massmann left his role as a key expert within Bayer’s crop sciences unit last month, taking to LinkedIn to share his own DSO observations. Some managers have been “greatly impeded by dilution and dispersion of decision authority and by proliferation of non-value work,” he wrote. He also saw “valueless efforts to package work into” 90-day work cycles. It remains to be seen if this is moving the needle for investors. Berenberg analyst Sebastian Bray described two things that he thinks could spur a stock rally: reversing years of declining earnings per share, or landing decisive legal wins. “Neither occurrence seems imminent,” he wrote to investors in November, a statement that has held true since then. The balance sheet offers a sobering assessment of Bayer’s future. The company remains in the penalty box for investors with its debt, lawsuits and low earnings. Net sales fell by about 6% in 2023 from the previous year, and Wall Street forecasts another year-over-year decline to end 2024. Xarelto, Bayer’s best-selling medicine, is seeing accelerating declines in year-over-year sales, even before key patents expire in 2026. Anderson is transparent about these challenges, and he acknowledges that even DSO on its own cannot fix Bayer. “I wish it was that simple,” he said. Bayer’s pharma future needs to find replacements for Eylea and Xarelto. Anderson’s philosophy is simple: Great drugs lead the way, not existing franchises. He has seen that play out at Biogen with multiple sclerosis drugs, and at Roche and Genentech with Hemlibra in hemophilia or Ocrevus and Evrysdi in neuroscience. “A great molecule trumps everything,” he said. “The molecule makes the franchise, not the other way around.” Nubeqa may be that molecule. First approved in the US in 2019, the prostate cancer drug has surpassed €1 billion in sales through the first nine months of 2024, up 77% from the same period a year ago. It is the most important growth driver of Bayer’s pharma business. That success, Anderson said, can be attributed to DSO. Nicole Dinello, a pharma commercial veteran with over 30 years in the industry, arrived at Bayer just before Anderson did. She helped launch Nubeqa and shared numerous examples of how DSO changed how she and her team work. On their own, the changes aren’t earth-shattering. They removed two layers of management above her. Her team started making faster decisions. When someone asked what the team is doing for Spanish speakers in the US, they decided in the same meeting to translate a TV ad into Spanish and create a website and patient materials in Spanish. In a different instance, Dinello brought in a marketer from the cardiovascular business who helped craft Nubeqa’s social media strategy, working a few hours a week on that project. Each example adds into a better-functioning business. “It would never have occurred to me to go to the cardiovascular team and poach their talent,” Dinello said. “DSO feels different.” Anderson is no longer living through another Groundhog Day. But will his best efforts and new work philosophy be enough to save Bayer?