John Maraganore, the longtime CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and a pioneering executive in a Nobel Prize-winning field of drugmaking known as RNA interference, will leave the company as part of a planned transition.
Alnylam announced Thursday that current company president and chief operating officer Yvonne Greenstreet will take over for Maraganore as the company's full-time CEO by the end of the year. Maraganore, who has led Alnylam for nearly two decades, will help in a consulting role through the end of March and remain on the company's scientific advisory board thereafter.
"I have decided that this is the right time to transition my leadership at year end to focus my next chapter on helping other entrepreneurs and companies advance new frontiers of medicine," Maraganore said in the statement. "I couldn't be more excited about Alnylam's future under Yvonne's leadership, and am more confident than ever in the company's prospects."
Maraganore isn't retiring and hasn't yet declared his future plans, according to an Alnylam spokesperson.
"He firmly believes that we're at the beginnings of an explosion of new biomedical innovation and wants to be a big part of that given his personal passion for science, medicine, patients and innovation," the spokesperson wrote in an email to BioPharma Dive. Maraganore's next move will involve "building new modalities," she added.
Maraganore joined Alnylam in 2002 after stops at Biogen and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. At Biogen, he designed a drug known as bivalirudin, a blood thinner eventually sold by The Medicines Co. and known as Angiomax. At Millennium, he cut a deal to acquire LeukoSite, the biotech that discovered the successful blood cancer drug Velcade.
But Maraganore is best known for his role leading Alnylam, which was just a small, venture-backed startup when he took over for Christoph Westphal as the company's CEO nearly 20 years ago. Alnylam was formed to develop drugs based on a then-emerging field of science known as RNA interference, a method of "silencing" disease-causing genes before they can make harmful proteins. The work, based on discoveries scientists Andrew Fire and Craig Mello would win a Nobel Prize for in 2006, represented a completely new way of making drugs.
"That was an opportunity I just could not walk away from," Maraganore said in 2014. "How could you say no?"
Alnylam invested heavily in the effort, snapping up a series of patents as it went on to become the RNAi field's biggest company. Still, Alnylam spent 16 years trying to turn that research into a business. Pharmaceutical companies fell in and out of love with RNAi amid challenges delivering the medicines safely and effectively into cells. Alnylam burned through more than $2 billion and suffered multiple setbacks before it finally brought its first drug, a rare disease treatment known as Onpattro, to market in 2018.
Since then, Alnylam has proven Onpattro wasn't a fluke, winning approval of two more drugs, also for rare conditions. Another medicine it discovered and which is now owned by Novartis, Leqvio, is cleared in Europe for high cholesterol. And a next-generation version of Onpattro could soon reach market as well.
Alnylam shares, worth roughly $5 near the start of the last decade, climbed over $200 apiece in 2021, turning the once-tiny startup into an "emerging large cap" biotech company that has "fundamentally derisked" RNAi technology, wrote Stifel analyst Paul Matteis. Alnylam generated nearly $464 million in drug sales over the first nine months of the year.
Alnylam is now a company in transition. Maraganore's longtime executive partner, Barry Greene, left the company last year to run Sage Therapeutics. Now, Maraganore is headed elsewhere in "a big surprise we did not see coming," Matteis wrote in a note to clients.
Alnylam shares fell 15% as investors digested the news, which Matteis tied to the "continuity [and] trust" in Maraganore's leadership.