Pfizer is this year’s anti-Eli Lilly. If David Ricks is the best biopharma CEO of 2023, then Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla is, unfortunately, the worst.
My annual Worst Biopharma CEO list is typically populated with blockheads and scoundrels. That’s not why Bourla is here. The reason is accountability. Strategic missteps, financial miscalculations, and scientific setbacks have plunged Pfizer into a deep crisis. Bourla is the man at the top, so the responsibility lies with him.
Pfizer shares have fallen 50% this year to their lowest level in more than a decade, erasing nearly $140 billion in market value. In 2022, the company delivered $100 billion in revenue, boosted by a widely used Covid vaccine and Covid treatment. This year, Covid product sales evaporated — and will fall further next year — leaving a vacuum Pfizer is struggling to fill with aging medicines nearing the end of their patent lives, and newer drugs and vaccines that have not performed as expected.
Last week, the company kitchen-sinked its 2024 financial guidance — well below Wall Street forecasts — and announced more spending cuts. Thousands of Pfizer employees have been laid off.
Bourla has an opportunity to turn Pfizer around. The 2024 reset should get an assist from the $43 billion acquisition of cancer drugmaker Seagen. When the transaction closed last week, Pfizer reorganized the structure of the company, creating a new cancer-focused business and research unit aimed at improving performance. Pfizer has leaned heavily into M&A to find future growth — not just Seagen but also Biohaven, Global Blood, and Arena Pharmaceuticals. Pfizer believes drugs from these deals could deliver $25 billion in sales by 2030.
The company desperately needs some wins. If not, Bourla won’t be around to land on this list for another year.
About those blockheads and scoundrels. I have them covered. Let’s get to it.
Chaim Lebovits, BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics
I’ve long said that a negative clinical trial outcome, alone, is not a reason to land on the worst CEO list. There’s usually no fault in drug-development setbacks. They happen all too frequently, and the best CEOs manage the disappointment transparently.
And then there’s Lebovits. Instead of owning up to the repeated clinical failures of NurOwn, BrainStorm’s stem cell therapy for ALS, Lebovits and his lieutenants twisted and spun the negative results of NurOwn’s Phase 3 study. Subgroups of patients in which the therapy “might work” were invented. Statistics were tortured to support implausible theories about predictive biomarkers. And deeply rooted, persistent manufacturing problems were concealed, rather than fixed.
This pitiful charade went on for three years. It finally ended this year, when the Food and Drug Administration shed a disinfecting light on the NurOwn debacle. ALS is a devastating disease. Patients and their caregivers deserve honesty, not false hope.
Antony Mattessich, Ocular Therapeutix
Mattessich spent the year piling malarkey so high, he eventually fell off, and landed on this list.
Ocular is a maker of treatments for degenerative eye diseases. Needing money to finance late-stage clinical trials, Mattessich teased shareholders with repeated stories about how prospective, and deep-pocketed, pharma companies were competing to land partnership rights.
The company’s “data room” — where Ocular was sharing confidential information with these prospective partners — was “extremely active,” Mattessich told shareholders in May. “We have a really good group of strategics that are looking at this. And we are inundated by questions at the moment,” he said.
In June, Mattesich, speaking at an investor conference, said “partners” understood that paying $300 million for rights to Ocular’s lead pipeline drug was “not a tremendous investment” because the drug could easily do $5-7 billion in peak sales.
All of the activity in the data room was “causing us sleepless nights,” because his staff were “answering endless questions,” Mattesich told the investor crowd. “One of the things you realize as a small biotech company, when you have large companies in the data room, they have squadrons of people coming in.”
In August, Ocular took on $80 million in new debt. Don’t worry, Mattesich assured shareholders that Ocular was still planning to raise money without dilution. The debt “does not alter our strategy of aligning with a strategic partner,” he said. “To date, we have been very pleased with the quality and level of engagement as we focus discussions with potential partners.”
Last week, Ocular diluted shareholders. The company sold 31 million shares of stock at $3.25 per share, near the company’s all-time low.
That data room must be hopping.
Dennis Lanfear, Coherus Biosciences
Coherus is a modest but generally successful maker of biosimilar drugs. Unfortunately, Lanfear has also committed the company to a quixotic quest to develop proprietary cancer immunotherapy treatments, believing that it can compete against pharma giants like Merck, AstraZeneca, and Roche.
In October, Coherus secured FDA approval for the ninth anti-PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor to reach the U.S. market. No one cares. Well, check that. Battered Coherus shareholders care because Lanfear has saddled the beleaguered company with debt while burning cash in a furnace. Shares are down 75% this year.
Francis DeSouza, Illumina
Illumina is a genetics sequencing powerhouse. Or was, until DeSouza tried to buy Grail, the developer of a multi-cancer screening test. European regulators raised concerns that the $8 billion merger was anticompetitive. So, too, did antitrust regulators in the U.S.
DeSouza didn’t care and closed the deal anyway — a disastrous management blunder that buckled Illumina and cost DeSouza his job. He resigned in June. On Sunday, a weakened and defeated Illumina said it would sell Grail. The company is unlikely to ever recoup what it spent.
Quick hits. Into the dumpster these folks go.
Cuong Do of BioVie for believing for a moment that he’d be taken seriously as the CEO of an Alzheimer’s disease company 60% owned by Terren Peizer, the disgraced biotech entrepreneur and financier currently under federal indictment for insider trading. Also, you can’t excuse a failed clinical trial by erasing data from 80% of the enrolled patients.
Chris Missling of Anavex Life Sciences for disappearing the results of a Phase 3 study involving children with Rett syndrome, completed six months ago.
Remi Barbier of Cassava Sciences because a CEO who pads his own pocket by pushing the development of a drug for Alzheimer’s that 100% does not work will always be on this list.