Biotech
Thursday, August 18th, 2022 4:31 am EDT
Schrödinger on Thursday named Geoffrey Porges its chief financial officer and top dealmaker, putting the high-profile biotechnology analyst in charge of a long list of partnerships that it intends to grow.
The New York biotech, known for its drug discovery capabilities, said Porges will oversee its financial operations and corporate affairs activities. He’ll also run business development and strategic planning for Schrödinger’s industry collaborations.
Porges has been a biotech analyst for nearly two decades, having spent 13 years at AllianceBernstein and then another seven at SVB Securities. At SVB, Porges became a senior managing director and headed its therapeutics research, covering pharmaceutical companies as well as large and small biotechnology companies.
But Porges has had a previous stint in industry as well, early in his career helping to commercialize Merck & Co.’s vaccines and serving as Chief Operating Officer of British pharmaceutical company BTG. He’ll now return to the sector by joining a three-decade-old company, Schrödinger, which has built a business out of its drug discovery software and is now advancing its own medicines, too.
Schrödinger’s software is used by biotechs, venture firms and pharmaceutical companies to help shorten the process of finding a potential drug to bring to testing. A collaboration with Agios Pharmaceuticals, for instance, led to the cancer drugs Tibsovo and Idhifa, while partnerships with privately held startups like Nimbus Therapeutics have produced candidates now in clinical testing. The company generated about $113 million in revenue from that technology in 2021.
In recent years, Schrödinger has branched out and begun developing drugs in-house. Its pipeline now includes several prospective cancer treatments, led by an experimental lymphoma drug expected to begin Phase 1 testing later this year. Schrödinger has already licensed off some of that work through a 2020 deal with Bristol Myers Squibb, and formed research partnerships with Takeda and Zai Lab. Porges will be in charge of expanding that network.
“The company’s balance sheet and revenue outlook are very strong and there are many opportunities to expand the company’s current portfolio of collaborative and internal programs, and software partnerships,” Porges said in a statement.
Other top analysts have joined the industry this year as well. Bernstein’s Ronny Gal, who had spent more than 20 years as an analyst and consultant, was named Novartis’s chief strategy and growth officer in April. A month earlier, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Alethia Young, who’d previously worked at Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse, became gene editing biotech Graphite Bio’s chief financial officer.
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