Richard Pops, one of the biopharmaceutical industry’s longest-serving chief executives, will step down as the head of Alkermes at the end of July, the company announced Wednesday.
Pops will be succeed by Chief Operating Officer Blair Jackson on July 31, Alkermes said. He’ll remain Alkermes’ board chair afterwards and help advise the company’s executive team. Jackson will join the board during the transition.
Alkermes hired Pops as CEO in 1991, four years after its founding and at a time when it was best known as a drug delivery specialist. The company built a business helping solve one of the sector’s most vexing biological challenges — helping drugs cross the blood-brain barrier — and in the three decades since has gone through several ups and downs trying to create its own medicines for brain diseases and cancer.
A depression drug Alkermes once developed, for instance, was panned by advisers to the Food and Drug Administration and subsequently rejected by the regulator in 2019, triggering a stock crash and a restructuring. A cancer immunotherapy it once worked on drew frustration from investors before being spun out into Mural Oncology. There, the therapy fell short in clinical testing, leading Mural to accept a liquidation deal last year.
But after years with a stagnating stock price, Alkermes has seen its value steadily climb this decade. The company has a three-year streak of positive earnings that started in 2023, and has homed in more on mental health and sleep medicines — the schizophrenia treatment Lybalvi and, most recently, a class of “orexin” drugs viewed as potential future blockbusters.
“Together, we have built a company with a strong financial foundation, commercial medicines that have reached hundreds of thousands of patients with serious mental illness or addiction, and a compelling opportunity ahead in sleep medicine,” Pops said in a statement.
Along the way, Pops became one of biotech’s most visible figures, frequently speaking at industry conventions and serving on the boards of the Biotechnology Innnovation Organization and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. At times, he was also one of the highest paid CEOs across biopharma.
“The board is grateful for Richard’s decades of leadership and his continued commitment to the company,” said Andy Wilson, the board’s lead independent director, in a statement. “We have full confidence in the strength of the organization Richard has built and its potential to continue on its growth trajectory under Blair’s leadership.”
Jackson will now steer Alkermes as it attempts to become a major player in sleep medicines. One drug for a certain kind of narcolepsy will begin late-stage testing this quarter. Alkermes acquired another, Lumryz, with its recent acquisition of Avadel Pharmaceuticals.
“The leadership change could be welcome by investors as the company moves more deeply into the sleep space,” wrote RBC Capital Markets analyst Leonid Timashev, in a Wednesday note to clients.
The Avadel acquisition is expected to add new costs to Alkermes’ balance sheet in 2026, both in inventory and intellectual property expenses. In an earnings report also issued Wednesday, the company announced $242 million in profit on $1.5 billion in 2025 revenue. But Alkermes also forecasted between $115 million and $135 million in losses this year on revenues of $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion.
“We had already expected this dynamic, but note it may continue to optically weigh on shares,” Timashev wrote.
Alkermes shares fell as much as 8% in morning trading.
