Biogen Inc. (NASDAQ:BIIB) TD Cowen 45th Annual Health Care Conference March 3, 2025 9:10 AM ET
Company Participants
Chris Viehbacher – CEO
Conference Call Participants
Phil Nadeau – TD Cowen
Phil Nadeau
Good morning, and welcome once again to TD Cowen’s 45th Annual Healthcare Conference. I’m Phil Nadeau, one of the biotech analysts here at Cowen, and it’s my pleasure to moderate a fireside chat with Chris Viehbacher, the CEO of Biogen.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q – Phil Nadeau
Biogen is obviously a bellwether that probably needs no introduction. But nonetheless, Chris, we’ll start with your vision for Biogen. What is your vision for Biogen over the next five years? How do you expect Biogen to create shareholder value?
Chris Viehbacher
Yeah. Well, first, companies in our space are always on a journey somewhere, right? And usually, you are where you are by someone’s vision five years ago. And that was really — the vision was, okay, we knew we were going to face a lot of competition for our MS portfolio, but the Alzheimer’s franchise was going to more than make up for that. First, Aduhelm and of course, we all know what happened to that. And then LEQEMBI. And so when I came in, the idea was we’re going to launch LEQEMBI and then we have the Sage product for major depressive disorder. And that never came about. And obviously, LEQEMBI is on a good ramp, but it’s not quite what everybody expected. So — and then the pipeline was all pretty spicy. In fact, one investor last week described it as what you might find as a VC-backed pipeline. And so there’s been an awful lot of need to kind of tidy that up and move away from just purely neuroscience. And then there was also quite a lot of work to do to really realign resources with the company, not just take resources out, but shift it from MS to new spaces. So — and over the last year, it felt like