Pfizer has hired a new oncology commercialization leader to help the business reach its goal of marketing eight blockbuster drugs by 2030.
Suneet Varma, currently the commercial president of Pfizer’s oncology unit, has decided to retire after 15 years with the pharma giant. Pfizer’s chief oncology officer, Chris Boshoff, M.D., Ph.D., announced the move Friday on LinkedIn.
Filing Varma’s position will be Tina Deignan, Ph.D., who was most recently a senior VP leading Novartis’ U.S. oncology business. In between her latest two-year stint and a prior seven-year stop at Novartis, Deignan worked for 15 years at Bristol Myers Squibb, spending much of that time in the company's oncology division. At BMS, Deignan led “the launch of iconic cancer immunotherapy indications,” Boshoff said in the LinkedIn post.
Deignan will officially start this fall, and Varma will stay with Pfizer until early 2025 to ensure a smooth transition, according to Boshoff. Rodney Gillespie, who had been Novartis’ international oncology therapeutic area head, has taken on the U.S. oncology chief role, a company spokesperson told Fierce Pharma.
Varma joined Pfizer through the Wyeth acquisition in 2009, originally in a consumer health capacity. In 2022, he was reassigned from Pfizer’s rare disease department to serve as global oncology and U.S. president. Then, as part of an organizational overhaul in late 2023 that made oncology a separate unit within Pfizer, Boshoff became the leader of that franchise, with Varma serving as the unit's commercial chief.
The reorg that elevated the oncology group at Pfizer was triggered by the company’s $43 billion acquisition of antibody-drug conjugate specialist Seagen. Since the buyout, Pfizer has unveiled a goal to market eight blockbuster cancer drugs by 2030, compared with five today.
During an interview on the sidelines of American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting earlier this month, Varma said Pfizer expects the blockbusters to come from each of its four focus areas, namely breast, genitourinary, hematology and thoracic cancers.
At the time, Varma said Pfizer’s ongoing cost-cutting initiatives wouldn’t affect oncology, as the department had already finished its own post-merger consolidations. He also said Pfizer Oncology’s commercial infrastructure is at the right scale with the ability to take on additional products.
Novartis and Pfizer share some overlapping business segments in oncology. One of the imminent tasks for Deignan includes managing the decline of the CDK4/6 inhibitor Ibrance, an in-class competitor to Novartis’ Kisqali. Ibrance has been losing market share after several negative phase 3 readouts, but, as of 2023, it was still Pfizer’s largest oncology asset with $4.75 billion in annual sales. By comparison, Kisqali saw sales jump 69% last year to $2.08 billion.
In addition, Pfizer’s Braftovi-Mektovi duo is a direct rival to Novartis’ Tafinlar-Mekinist combo in the BRAF-MEK field, with the Novartis regimen clearly ahead in terms of sales.
There’s also Pfizer’s Astellas-partnered Xtandi, which, like Novartis’ radioligand therapy Pluvicto, plays in the prostate cancer arena. The two drugs could clash soon, as Novartis is readying an FDA filing for Pluvicto in PSMA-positive, metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.
The transition also comes amid the high-profile rollout of the Astellas-partnered ADC Padcev, used in combination with Merck’s Keytruda, in first-line bladder cancer. There, Deignan will lead the charge against an Opdivo-chemo regimen by her old employer, BMS, and another immunotherapy by Merck KGaA.
Deignan is leaving her U.S. oncology job at Novartis as the Swiss pharma puts an increased emphasis on the U.S. market. Besides Pluvicto’s potential expansion into the pre-chemo prostate cancer setting, the company is also awaiting an FDA decision for Kisqali as a post-surgery adjuvant therapy in HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer.