For those interested in what Biogen CEO Chris Viehbacher had to...

For those interested in what Biogen CEO Chris Viehbacher had to say in response to various analyst questions about business development…

In summary, Viehbacher is always keen to reinforce the company’s pipeline, is constantly looking at potential assets at every clinical stage, is still keen on rare disease, doesn’t regret the Reata acquisition and would do it again and he has culled a number of internal programs in order to create the financial capacity to bring other assets in.

However, he’s also not keen on taking on a lot of risk on Phase 3 trials; he thinks that people selling companies are asking prices out of step with the growing financial pressures on pharma and he doesn’t want to do just one deal that takes up all the company’s cashflow.

As I said, we are very excited about the pipeline that we have. But I think one of the things that we'd like to do is continue to reinforce that pipeline.

Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that you can never have enough pipeline. First element is we've done a major restructuring of research because I think as companies in our industry, it's very expensive to bring in late-stage assets. And we would like to have research be our primary source of innovation, obviously, internally, but also externally. And so I think we have completely restructured research to create the financial capacity as well as the talent capacity to do more collaborations and bring assets in, particularly pre-GLP tox.

Beyond that, we are looking at virtually every phase, the early phase development. Right now, I would say Priya would probably agree with me that our early stage development pipeline is still relatively thin. But even if we can find things in phase 3, if it's got a really solid phase 2, I'm not big on taking a lot of risk on phase 3 clinical trials because that gets expensive. And in terms of acquisitions, we have been migrating in new areas such as immunology and rare diseases.

And if we can find acquisitions that can bolster our positions in that, we will do so. We don't have a particular size that we're looking for. It could be late stage development. It could be early stage commercial.

The one thing it has to do is make financial sense. I think where we are as a company, we don't need to be taking a huge amount of risk on acquisitions. That said, we are always looking. We always have about at least 15 to 20 different projects that we're looking at, at any one time….



For us, over time, we believe that Skyclarys is going to be a significant product. I think it is already a significant product. If we found another Reata where we -- you've got a product that is about to be launched on the market, and you could buy it for a price that generates a return for our shareholders then we would do it.

But I think part of the problem is I don't think the people who are selling companies have quite integrated a lot of the pressures that are on this industry. The IRA is a de facto reduction in patent life for our industry, and there's a lot of pricing pressure from around the world. So the total commercial return for any one molecule today is not what it was even five years ago. And yet, I don't see really any shift in the premiums being paid or the price being paid.

And there's always an asymmetry between the products that you know and the products that you're going to buy. And so I think right now, we say we will look, if we could find another Reata, we would probably do it. We don't particularly want to do one deal that takes all of our cash flow because I think there is an interest in building the pipeline with multiple assets….


….business development, every time you do a deal, you bring in potentially new R&D expense. But I think what you've seen us do is prioritize. We've actually stopped a number of internal programs, which actually creates the financial capacity to bring other assets in.

One of the biggest problems of business development typically has been that the R&D budget is full, and there isn't any room to bring in new things. Well, we are actually making some of those difficult choices and the same is true on research. We have dramatically reduced our research budget but the idea was not necessarily to just save cost. The idea was that we wanted a different mix in there.

And by prioritizing, we can actually do business development without having to increase our overall expenditure, at least that's what we've been able to do so far.