4 years after he resigned as chief medical officer at Novartis within the wake of a restructuring on the Huge Pharma, John Tsai, M.D., has taken up an analogous function at Daiichi Sankyo.
Tsai has been appointed international head of R&D on the Japanese pharma, the place he’ll take over from Ken Takeshita, M.D., who’s stepping down April 1. Tsai beforehand held senior R&D positions at Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb and Amgen earlier than taking over the CMO place at Novartis in 2018.
Throughout his four-year stint on the Swiss pharma, Tsai led the event of 160 tasks and 500 scientific trials that resulted in international approvals for 15 new medicines, in keeping with Daiichi’s post-market launch yesterday. Tsai determined to go away Novartis in April 2022 as the corporate kicked off an organizational restructure.
Nonetheless, he’s remained busy within the interim, serving as an govt companion at Syncona Funding Administration, the place he has been liable for launching and overseeing a variety of fledgling biotechs. In 2023, Tsai was appointed to move up certainly one of these corporations, the heart-disease-focused Forcefield Therapeutics.
“John Tsai will carry distinctive experience to our continued pursuit of cutting-edge science and know-how and might be a formidable addition to the Daiichi Sankyo management crew as we execute our subsequent five-year marketing strategy and past,” Daiichi CEO Hiroyuki Okuzawa mentioned in a Feb. 19 launch.
“We thank Ken Takeshita for main the worldwide transformation of our R&D perform, together with the event of the corporate’s industry-leading antibody drug conjugate (ADC) portfolio,” Okuzawa added.
Regardless of the success of Enhertu, Daiichi’s ADC adventures haven’t all the time gone to plan. The pharma just lately discontinued inner growth of a next-wave candidate that includes its second ADC platform, in addition to saying one other delay for a extremely anticipated section 3 readout for the AstraZeneca-partnered Datroway.
In one other setback, Daiichi and companion Merck & Co. have been just lately hit with a scientific maintain for his or her B7-H3-directed ADC ifinatamab deruxtecan after logging an surprising variety of deaths as a result of interstitial lung illness (ILD). The FDA has since lifted the maintain, and the 2 corporations have carried out a stricter threat administration protocol, together with exclusion of sufferers with excessive ILD dangers and extra coaching of investigators and scientific trial employees.
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