The ink is barely dry on Pfizer’s agreement to buy Bind Therapeutics out of bankruptcy and shut it down, but the employee exodus has begun.
Andrew Hirsch, who was Cambridge, MA-based Bind’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIND]]) chief financial officer before taking over for Scott Minick as CEO in 2015, has been named the CFO of another Boston-area biotech, Agios Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AGIO]]).
Hirsch was Bind’s CFO from 2012 to 2014 and had stints at Avila Therapeutics (acquired by Celgene) and Biogen before that. He comes to Agios, however, after a bad run at Bind that culminated with a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and a $40 million sale at an auction to Pfizer. As Xconomy reported in late July, Pfizer’s plans were to bring Bind’s assets in-house and close down the company.
Bind was forced into bankruptcy in May after lender Hercules Technology accelerated a payment due on a loan offered to the company. Bind, a nanotechnology startup that emerged from the labs of MIT’s Robert Langer and Harvard Medical School’s Omid Farokhzad, went public at $15 per share in 2013. But despite partnerships with companies like Amgen, Pfizer, Merck, and AstraZeneca, the company was never able to grow its stock price. Its lead drug, BIND-014, also disappointed in clinical trials.
