🔒Phase Two: Biohaven sets sights on new ailments after $11.6B Pfizer deal

For many entrepreneurs, an $11.6-billion buyout might be an opportunity to take a few years off, or even retire to a life of leisure.

Not for the researchers and core staff of New Haven’s Biohaven Pharmaceuticals. After striking an $11.6-billion deal with Pfizer for its migraine drug portfolio, Biohaven’s leadership team immediately spun off a new company and started focusing on a new set of neurological ailments.

“On Oct. 3, the deal with Pfizer closed, and on Oct. 4, we started the new company,” said Dr. Vlad Coric, founder and CEO of Biohaven.

“The exit to Pfizer was important because they have a footprint that they can bring [migraine drug Nurtec] to patients around the world,” Coric said. “What was really important [to us] is how do you structure a deal so that we can continue our work?”

Biohaven, established in New Haven in 2013, made national news in May when Pfizer announced the buyout, in which it would acquire the biotech’s portfolio of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) receptor antagonists.

Most notably, the pharma giant would now own the blockbuster migraine drug rimegepant, branded as Nurtec ODT in the United States and Vydura in the European Union. Endorsed by celebrities like Khloe Kardashian, Nurtec generated $136 million in sales in the third quarter of 2021 alone, according to Fierce Biotech, for a total of $336 million in sales to that point since its March 2020 launch.

“I still get emails and calls about how our drug has changed someone’s life,” Coric said. “When you look at what we as a small company accomplished, it was quite remarkable.”

Nurtec’s expanding market share soon drew the attention of industry giant Pfizer, which is based in New York but has a major R&D facility in Groton and a clinical research unit in New Haven.

Pfizer’s Connecticut footprint has been growing: Executives have said it plans $40 million in improvements in Groton and plans to hire 100 additional workers for a new center there devoted to the study of mRNA technology, used in the development of its groundbreaking COVID-19 vaccine.

With Biohaven’s suite of products based on CGRP receptor antagonists, Pfizer said it planned to expand marketing and availability of the drugs, offering effective new options for migraine sufferers worldwide and bolstering its internal medicine pipeline.

“Combined with Pfizer’s global reach, this acquisition increases our potential to bring new treatment options to patients with migraines — a disease which affects over 1 billion people worldwide,” said Aamir Malik, Pfizer’s executive vice president, chief business innovation officer.

‘New Biohaven’

As when homegrown Alexion was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2021, the New Haven biotech community held its breath when Biohaven’s Pfizer deal was announced. Would the company be moving out of town or shedding jobs?

Coric and his team soon announced they had no plans to decamp to the Big Apple or even Groton. Part of the Pfizer deal was the creation of a new company that would remain in New Haven with the 200 core employees who helped launch Nurtec.

The “new Biohaven” would also retain the company’s non-migraine pipeline — Kv7 ion channel activators and glutamate modulation and myostatin inhibition platforms that show promise for a range of neurological diseases including epilepsy, obsessive compulsive disorder, spinal muscular atrophy and pain and mood disorders.

Biohaven Ltd. launched in October with $258 million in cash, no debt, and 13 clinical and preclinical programs focused on neuroscience and rare disorders. In the weeks after the Pfizer deal closed, Biohaven stock was in such demand that the company did a quick raise, which brought in another $300 million.

“People knew our team, knew our story, and then a lot of investors wanted to buy more stock,” Coric said. “We’ve kind of demonstrated to the Street that we know how to do R&D and we can also launch our own drugs — there’s not a lot of companies that can do both of those. That is important because it gives us access to capital to run our R&D.”

“There’s clear signaling that there’s more good science here to pursue,” said Peter Denious, president and CEO of AdvanceCT, the state’s nonprofit business-recruitment arm.

The positive reception of Biohaven’s spinoff is “incredibly good news for New Haven,” Denious added. “It’s just the kind of vibrancy you want to see.”

Denious said he has been telling the Biohaven story to life science companies interested in locating facilities in the state. Biohaven’s example is also important in that it shows success in finding funding for great ideas, Denious added.

“We have great R&D, we have great research, intellectual property – what we have not been good at is linking that to capital sources,” Denious said of the state’s bioscience industry.

With the Pfizer deal, Coric joins the ranks of area serial biotech founders like Jonathan Rothberg of Quantum-Si and Craig Crews of Arvinas, according to Denious.

“The capital will find the great idea and the great entrepreneur,” he said.

Seeking new cures

For Coric, neurological diseases represent a great opportunity for smaller biotechs, after pharma giants mostly pulled out of the field about a decade ago seeking simpler and more profitable drug targets.

Raised in part on the grounds of the now-closed psychiatric Norwich State Hospital, Coric said he long felt a strong pull toward studying neurological ailments once considered untreatable and incurable.

“We’re finally getting to a point where we’re understanding the neurobiology of these illnesses and we’re much more informed,” Coric said.

Targeting specific cell mechanisms using advanced drug-delivery technology allows for treatments with better results and fewer side effects, Coric added.

With the “new Biohaven,” Biohaven Ltd., Coric sees an opportunity to focus on diseases like epilepsy and seizure disorders, currently treated with drugs with many disabling side effects. Biohaven’s Kv7 ion channel activator platform shows promise for controlling epileptic seizures without making patients groggy and sleepy, unlike current treatments, Coric said.

“It is important because patients are on these meds their whole life. … What they hate most is the side effects,” Coric said. “So, just like what we did for migraines, we would try and do for epilepsy in our Kv7 program.”

The same Kv7 mechanism may also be at work in bipolar disorder and major depression, he added.

“This would be a big paradigm shift if we’re right,” Coric said.

Other Biohaven programs in earlier stages of development target the biological processes that cause Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, obsessive compulsive disorder and spinal cerebellar ataxia, a focus of Coric’s own early research.

“We think a common denominator for some of these neurodegenerative disorders is an overactive immune system that’s attacking your own cells,” Coric said. “We have a few immunomodulators that we hope will be ready for the clinic and testing next year or the year after.”

For now, Biohaven is sticking with its core team of about 200 employees and remaining in its home base at 215 Church St. The company bought the adjacent former Quinnipiack Club at 221 Church for $4.1 million earlier this year but has no immediate plans to add significant head count or new facilities, Coric said.

“The plans are to expand here in New Haven, but it’s going to be staged,” Coric said. “We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We like our footprint here and we’re going to continue to expand here.”

It made sense for the new Biohaven to stay local, Coric said.

“You have an amazing amount of research coming out of Yale — also UConn — and we have a talent base that knows drug development,” Coric said of New Haven.