BMY Bristol Myers Squibb Co

Cancer doctor on drugmaker's board is leaving executive post at Boston hospital

By Jonathan D. Rockoff 

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. said it would replace its research-and-development chief, naming a Massachusetts General Hospital executive to the key job as the company seeks to move past a major drug-development setback.

Thomas Lynch Jr., a Bristol board member and cancer doctor who has been overseeing Massachusetts General's physicians, will take the helm of the company's laboratories on March 16. He will leave the board and replace Francis Cuss, who Bristol said is retiring.

Last year, Bristol said that its immunotherapy Opdivo failed to perform significantly better than chemotherapy in a trial testing untreated lung-cancer patients, a big market that the company had been dominating.

Bristol pioneered the introduction of immunotherapy drugs, which fight cancer using the body's own immune system. But the unexpected study results gave rivals an opening to catch up, and wiped away tens of billions of dollars in the company's market value.

Bristol CEO Giovanni Caforio said in an interview that the management change was "really about the future," not past performance.

Dr. Lynch's experience in cancer-drug research, academic medicine and managing doctors will help Bristol as it seeks to get ahead of scientific advances and cost pressures that are remaking how drugs are discovered, reimbursed and prescribed by physicians, Dr. Caforio said.

"It's about the capabilities we need, the skills we need in order to deliver on the extraordinary value of" Bristol's pipeline of promising drugs, Dr. Caforio said.

Dr. Lynch steps into the R&D job at an important juncture for Bristol as the company seeks to retain its hold on the market for immunotherapy drugs as well as find new drug franchises that furnish new sales and broaden the company's revenue base.

Bristol is racing rivals to bring to market the next generation of cancer treatments, which will pair immunotherapies with each other or with other agents. The company hopes the combinations can help it overcome the failure to prove the benefit of treating lung patients with Opdivo alone.

In the next year, Bristol will also learn whether late-stage trials support Opdivo's use in kidney, liver and other cancers, and it will have to decide which of its drugs in the earlier stages of development, including new kinds of immunotherapies, to invest in studying further.

Dr. Lynch said in an interview that he aims to deepen Bristol's efforts to target drugs to the right patients by using molecular clues known as biomarkers that can help indicate whether a patient is likely to benefit.

Analysts say the Opdivo lung-cancer trial failed because it included too broad a selection of lung-cancer patients, rather than those whose tumors produce high levels of a protein known as PD-L1. After testing only those patients, Merck & Co. won approval for its drug Keytruda in untreated lung patients last October.

Developing drugs that are more likely to work in specific patients might also help pharmaceutical companies demonstrate the value of their medicines and overcome efforts by increasingly cost-conscious health plans to limit reimbursements, Dr. Caforio said

"What is required now in R&D is different than what was required a long time ago," Dr. Lynch said.

Dr. Lynch, 56, has a background in profiling patients likely to respond to treatment. While a Massachusetts General physician treating lung-cancer patients, in the 2000s, he helped show that those with a mutation to the EGFR gene were likely to benefit from certain drugs.

Dr. Cuss, 62, will serve as an adviser to the company for three months. Dr. Cuss said in a statement provided by Bristol that "it has been an honor" to captain the company's R&D and he was confident it "will continue to flourish" under Dr. Lynch's leadership.

Last month, Bristol said it appointed three new people to the company's board of directors and would repurchase $2 billion in stock, after the company talked with activist hedge fund Jana Partners LLC, which had taken a stake in the company in the fourth quarter of 2016. Investor Carl Icahn also took a stake, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Write to Jonathan D. Rockoff at Jonathan.Rockoff@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 09, 2017 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)

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