Rare disease specialist BioMarin has a new CEO in Alexander Hardy and he appears to be shaking up his commercial team as the company announced its lead Jeffrey Ajer will leave the company by July.
The disclosure, made via a short SEC filing, said the 18-year company veteran Ajer would "step down" as the company's executive vice president and chief commercial officer (CCO) in July and that the termination was “without cause.”
There was, unusually, no accompanying press release, quotes from Hardy or Ajer, and no details on plans for a new CCO. Ajer has been at BioMarin since 2005 and was promoted to his current position back in 2012.
A BioMarin spokesperson told Fierce Pharma Marketing that it "has begun a search for his successor and Jeff will continue to lead the organization in the interim."
The spokesperson added that Ajer held a "pivotal role" over his very long tenure at the company, and that "we are grateful for his many contributions during his tenure." The company did not say how or when he decided to leave the company, or if this was part of a new commercial strategy under Hardy.
It’s a pivotal time for BioMarin’s commercial team. Hardy spoke at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference just this week, telling investors that his “top priority” is expansion of the company’s dwarfism drug Voxzogo and hemophilia A therapy Roctavian.
Hardy said during the conference in San Francisco that his first objective as BioMarin’s new CEO is to accelerate and maximize the commercial potential of Voxzogo. The drug was approved in November 2021 to treat a rare condition called achondroplasia in children and generated $169 million in 2022.
In the first 9 months of 2023, the drug pulled in a little over $324 million, more than double its first year with three months still to be counted.
Still, Hardy sees much more to come from the drug, and his longer-term focus with Voxzogo is to bring several other pathway indications to expand its treatable patient population from its present of 21,000 to 600,000.
Hardy’s second objective is to ramp up the commercialization of Roctavian, BioMarin's newly approved gene therapy for hemophilia A. That drug made just $800,000 in the past nine months, something which apparently has irked Hardy (though it was only approved last June).
Hardy said at JPM that while the company reached an important milestone in dosing its first patient in the U.S. at the end of December, the launch has been “slower than anybody would have expected or would have wanted.” That may have hinted at some internal annoyance. Either way, both of these objectives require a strong commercial lead.