Is there any good news for Biogen?

It's been a rough couple of years for local drug powerhouse Biogen.

In February 2020, when the pandemic was beginning to take off, they went ahead and hosted a leadership conference at the Marriott Long Wharf on the Boston waterfront. In hindsight they should, of course, have canceled it - many other organizations were, by that point, starting to cancel meetings and travel - but that's hindsight for you. It's always a lot keener than foresight.

That event turned into the Typhoid Mary of conferences, a superspreader that's been tied to as many as 330,000 covid cases worldwide. 

Now, no company wants their name associated with disease - unless it's with curing it. Especially a drug company. So bad news.

And then there's the Aduhelm debacle.

Aduhelm is a treatment for Alzheimer's, and despite the fact that there wasn't great evidence from the clinical trials that pointed to its efficicacy, there was a lot of pressure on the FDA to expedite its release. Which they did - a controversial decision. (Several of the panelists who had recommended against it resigned. And there were rumors of senior FDA officials having back channel meetings with Biogen execs.  Not good.)

But to Biogen, that rushed release probably looked like a good thing. An awful lot of people are eager for a new treatment for Alzheimer's, as there hasn't been one in a while. And the disease is just so awful...

So Biogen was hoping for the big advantage of getting to market with something new and shiny when the market's so desperate for new and shiny. 

Then there was the not so good news. A number of private insurers decided Aduhelm was too unproven to cover. European health systems have given it a thumb's down. Sales have been paltry. 

Medicare may end up covering it. Which would be good news for Biogen. And probably for the Medicare recipients who are prescribed it. Although it may not work exactly, but it's still good to have something to be optimistic about, even if the optimism is somewhat misplaced. But especially if Aduhelm turns out to be a dud, it's going to be bad news for those of us on Medicare who are being hit with a premium increase that's being attributed to the cost of Aduhelm. (It costs $56K a year. Which seems like an awful lot for something that may not do any good.)

And the bad news just keeps on badding.

STAT - the health news service - has an extensive piece that covers the Aduhelm situation, as well as internal turmoil and political skullduggery.

Biogen's head of R&D, Alfred Sandrock - am I the only one thinking J. Alfred Prufrock here (ah, the perils of a liberal arts education) - is being forced out. CEO Michel Vounatsos may not be long for this world, either. Then there's the rumor that the company is about to layoff 1,000 employees - perhaps before the end of the year. There's also some talk about there having been something of a cabal of execs with Greek surnames making preferential hiring and promotion decisions when it came to fellow Hellenics. Opa!

I didn't actually read the STAT article. It was behind a paywall. What I gleaned, I gleaned from STAT tweets. 

Covid. Aduhelm. Layoffs. Greeks.

The communications staff at Biogen must have been delighted to have something to kvell about. Which was Newsweek's naming them to their list of America's Most Responsible Companies for 2021. I have no idea what that means - responsible for what - and if they turned out to have gotten a bit too cozy with the FDA, whatever responsibility means is in question. But when you've had the last couple of years, and the last couple of weeks, that Biogen has, I'm sure they'll take it.

One last Opa! I guess.