After a roughly year-long search, Biogen (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]) has named a replacement for former R&D chief Doug Williams, who left the company last July to run startup Codiak Biosciences. Biogen has hired Michael Ehlers as its executive vice president of R&D, a position he’ll begin late next month. Ehlers will join Biogen from Pfizer, where he had been chief scientific officer of the pharma company’s neuroscience and pain research unit, and the senior VP of its biotherapeutics R&D division.
Incidentally, when Ehlers signed on for that role last year, he took over for another executive who’d left a big company to run a startup—J.C. Gutierrez-Ramos, now the CEO of Synlogic.
Author: Ben Fidler
Ben is former Xconomy Deputy Editor, Biotechnology. He is a seasoned business journalist that comes to Xconomy after a nine-year stint at The Deal, where he covered corporate transactions in industries ranging from biotech to auto parts and gaming. Most recently, Ben was The Deal’s senior healthcare writer, focusing on acquisitions, venture financings, IPOs, partnerships and industry trends in the pharmaceutical, biotech, diagnostics and med tech spaces. Ben wrote features on creative biotech financing models, analyses of middle market and large cap buyouts, spin-offs and restructurings, and enterprise pieces on legal issues such as pay-for-delay agreements and the Affordable Care Act. Before switching to the healthcare beat, Ben was The Deal's senior bankruptcy reporter, covering the restructurings of the Texas Rangers, Phoenix Coyotes, GM, Delphi, Trump Entertainment Resorts and Blockbuster, among others. Ben has a bachelor’s degree in English from Binghamton University.
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