Novo Nordisk’s board of directors is still going through changes. On top of last fall’s significant shake-up, the company is now nominating two fresh faces to the board, each of whom would bring decades of combined industry expertise.
Jan van de Winkel and Ramona Sequeira are Novo’s newest proposed members of the board of directors, who would serve a one-year term if elected by shareholders at the company’s March 26 general meeting, according to a recent filing (PDF).
Van de Winkel co-founded Danish antibody specialist Genmab in 1999 and has remained on the company’s C-suite ever since, settling into the CEO seat in 2010.
Meanwhile, Sequeira got her feet wet in the industry when she started with Eli Lilly in 2010 before moving to Takeda for a ten-year stint across leadership roles, culminating in a position as president of the Japanese pharma’s global portfolio division. Since leaving Takeda last summer, Sequeira has held a spot on the board of directors for Merck women’s health spinout Organon. She has also served on the board of medical technology company Edwards Lifesciences since 2020.
Last year, Novo’s controlling shareholder the Novo Nordisk Foundation announced its plans to propose Helena Saxon and “one additional member” at its March 2026 annual general meeting. Saxon served as a board member of Sobi for 14 years and continues as a board member of the clothing company, H&M.
If confirmed, Van de Winkel, Sequeira and Saxon will join a roster of largely recent picks that were swapped in last year, when the company held an extraordinary general meeting to elect new members as seven hit the exit.
The board refreshment was the consequence of the Foundation and the company failing to “reach a common understanding,” former board chair Helge Lund said in a statement at the time, noting that the Foundation wanted a “more extensive reconfiguration” of the board.
The meeting was held months after the company named Maziar Mike Doustdar as its new CEO, following long-time CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen’s surprise departure over the summer. Shareholders ultimately voted in Lars Rebien Sørensen, who served as Novo’s CEO from 2000 to 2016, as chair of the board, while Cees de Jong was voted in as vice chair.
Sørensen, who also chairs the Novo Foundation, was selected to execute on two key objectives: supporting the company's new management in “implementing its transformation plans” and identifying a new chair who can lead into the 2030’s, the Foundation said at the time. The move gave the top shareholder significant control over the company's direction by pushing out much of the pre-existing slate of board members.
The Foundation also picked Britt Meelby Jensen and Stephan Engels as board members, both of whom were confirmed by shareholders at the extraordinary general meeting in November. Jensen, Engels, Sørensen and de Jong all are serving terms that expire in 2026, according to Novo’s recent filing. If the three new proposed board members are voted in, they will also join Novo Holdings’ CEO Kasim Kutay, who has served on the board since 2017, and four employee-elected board members.
The Foundation had also included Pfizer vet Mikael Dolsten in its slate of proposed board members, but the executive dropped out of the election due to “personal circumstances” shortly before the meeting.
Novo’s board shake-up reflects the continued pressure the company faces as it loses its obesity lead to rival Eli Lilly and navigates pricing headwinds. Earlier this month, the company warned that it expects sales and earnings to slide between 5% and 13% this year amid "intensifying competition" in the U.S., with Doustdar giving notice of “a year of unprecedented pricing pressure” to come.
Aside from the CEO swap of 2025, Novo has recently said goodbye to other top leaders including U.S. operations head Dave Moore and VP of product and portfolio strategy Ludovic Helfgott, bringing in new talent from UnitedHealth and Merck KGaA as replacements.
Beyond its leadership changes, the company’s wider workforce will shrink by about 9,000 people in accordance with Doustdar’s plan to save around 8 billion Danish kroner ($1.3 billion) annually by the end of this year.