A month after a full rebrand, Invivyd is already facing a double-hit of C-suite departures and is at the same time also culling commercial roles as a continued effort to distance itself from the struggles of its COVID-19 antibody.
Until September, Invivyd was known as Adagio. It was under the Adagio banner that the biotech positioned adintrevimab as the answer to the emergence of new coronavirus variants. Things first got stormy for the the 2020 Fierce 15 winner with some disappointing data at the end of 2021 that raised questions about the therapy’s future. Then, this February, CEO Tillman Gerngross left the business.
The top-level disruption continued yesterday, with chief financial and business officer Jane Pritchett Henderson and chief commercial officer Eric Kimble both heading for the exits, the company announced in a post-market release. Renovacor's CFO Fred Driscoll has been drafted in as interim CFO at Invivyd while the company hunts for a permanent replacement.
The Massachusetts-based biotech did not respond to Fierce’s query about the additional number of affected staff by time of publication. The newly announced “headcount changes” at the company will span “several corporate and commercial positions, among others,” Invivyd said in a release.
In September, the biotech was still claiming that it was keen to get adintrevimab over the line in COVID, but it also said it was refocusing some of its COVID-19 efforts towards a combo therapy called NVD200, which is expected to enter the clinic in the first quarter of next year, per a release issued at the time. The company is also working on early-stage flu assets.
The layoffs are designed to “improve capital efficiency by reallocating resources to programs and functions to support our key activities on an accelerated timeline,” according to the release. This includes “building out additional discovery and early development positions” while pushing ahead with NVD200.
“As we look to the future, we are shaping the organization to align with our corporate strategy and enable the company to fully capitalize on the potential of our integrated discovery platform and generate multiple promising antibody candidates addressing serious viral infectious diseases, including COVID-19 and influenza,” Hering said in the release.