Rolling your sleeves up: Behind the scenes of a biotech takeout with Sophie Kornowski

Fresh off a $1.2B takeout of Boston Pharma by GSK, Kornowski parlays her years in pharma BD into lessons for biotechs, on The BioCentury Show

It took Sophie Kornowski under four years as CEO of Boston Pharma to bring it from a pipeline full of in-licensed assets to an acquisition by GSK for about $2 billion in total deal value for a single MASH program. Though her first gig as a biotech CEO, Kornowski’s success was built on her years of experience as head of partnering at Roche. She discussed that pivot and the value of rolling your sleeves up on the latest episode of The BioCentury Show.

Kornowski joined  Boston Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 2021 as adviser, then 2022 as CEO, from Gurnet Point Capital which she’d joined after leaving Roche (SIX:ROG; OTCQB:RHHBY) in 2018. Kornowski had been global head of partnering at the pharma since 2012, but had spent her career in pharmas. Gurnet Point was her first foray in the investor world, and Boston Pharma her first in a biotech.

The culmination of her time at both — Gurnet Point was the sole investor in the company — was the May takeout by GSK plc (LSE:GSK; NYSE:GSK) for $1.2B up front and $800 million in milestones for its FGF21 agonist efimosfermin alfa (BOS-580) for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). 

When she joined the biotech she found a collaborative team but some holes that she had to fill herself. “I do roll my sleeves up,” she said, “but I don’t do it alone.” The team explained the product to her, but “there was no marketing, very limited business development, so someone had to do the work. Hiring people, developing them at the stage where the company was wouldn’t have made any sense,” said Kornowski. CEOs need to think carefully before asking others to do work they could do themselves. When you do that, you are taking them away from the job they’re supposed to be doing, she said.

While it was “an exciting experience” to go through the process of reforecasting the company and reprioritizing programs, it required making decisions with much less information and much more ambiguity than in a pharma.

In pharmas, she said, “You have a five-year plan. Everything is very robust. It may not fly and you may have to redo the whole thing, but someone has put together something super solid.” 

In a biotech when you have five to 10 products, “it’s almost impossible to have a development plan integrated, and CMC, and a forecast for each of these molecules.” That means making decisions on “directional information,” she said. 

After she focused the pipeline on the FGF21 program and moved towards conversations with GSK, she drew on her experience sitting on the other side of the table. “I knew all the things that could be asked, how serious those questions could be, and how much a small mistake can derail a deal,” she said.

Transparency is critical, and you have to “forcefully align stars,” said Kornowski. Working with the team, she communicated to them not to get lost in the wrong details. “In a small biotech you get bombarded with a thousand questions, and if you are not disciplined you can get completely lost.” It was a tight group she said, through many months of diligence, but that is what led to the success.

Kornowski also discussed how she homed in on MASH and FGF21, a field that had been problematic for years; why there is now a flurry of pharma deals in that space; and how she sees it unfolding in the era of GLP-1s.