About two and a half years after originating the role of chief commercial officer at Arvinas, John Northcott is leaving his post at the biotech.
The change is effective immediately, according to Arvinas’ announcement Friday, which cited “personal reasons” for Northcott’s departure.
Northcott was tapped as Arvinas’ first-ever CCO in August 2022, following stints with the same title at the likes of Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, AbbVie’s Pharmacyclics and Nektar Therapeutics.
Taking his place on an interim basis is Alex Santini, who joined Arvinas in early 2023 as senior vice president of global and U.S. market access. Before that, Santini also spent time at Lexicon and Nektar—as CCO and senior VP of market access, respectively—and put in eight years at Bayer, including a term as executive VP of U.S. market access at the Big Pharma.
“Our commercial organization couldn’t be in a better position, and I look forward to working closely with Alex,” John Houston, Ph.D., Arvinas’ chair, CEO and president, said in the announcement. “He has been a highly valued member of the Arvinas team for multiple years, and his well-established ability to build and lead an outstanding commercial team will be invaluable as we prepare for our potential first launch alongside our partners at Pfizer.”
Of Northcott, Houston added, “We thank John for his contributions to the business, particularly his efforts to begin building a strong commercial organization for launch.”
Arvinas is fast approaching its first potential launch. Alongside the CCO switch-up, Friday’s release also detailed the company’s planned milestones for 2025, including the announcement sometime in the first quarter of topline data from a phase 3 monotherapy trial of vepdegestrant, a breast cancer candidate in development with Pfizer, followed by the launch of two more phase 3 combination trials of the therapeutic before the end of the year.
Elsewhere, the biotech is on track to unveil early data this spring around the use of its asset ARV-102 in Parkinson’s disease, plus, sometime this year, the initial results of a phase 1 trial of its ARV-393 in B-cell lymphomas.
Arvinas’ therapeutics are known as proteolysis targeting chimeras, or PROTACs, which are designed to tap into the body’s natural protein disposal system to trigger the degradation of disease-causing proteins. The company has centered its pipeline around potential treatments for traditionally “undruggable” disease targets, as unearthed by its PROTAC Discovery Engine.