Amgen, Karyopharm in legal war over exodus of sales reps; Novartis’ gene therapy head quits

By PharmaCompass

2019-06-06

Impressions: 309 Article

Last week, Karyopharm Therapeutics and Amgen waged a legal battle. Karyopharm is getting ready to launch its multiple myeloma drug — Selinexor — which will compete directly with Amgen's Kyprolis. And since December last, Karyopharm has been building its salesforce largely by poaching sales persons from Amgen. Since then, 19 sales persons have resigned Amgen to join Karyopharm.

Most other companies would have decided to hire more qualified sales persons and move on. However, Amgen decided to sue Karyopharm, alleging that it stole trade secrets about the performance of its salesforce and used the information to hire its best sales representatives.

Earlier this week, Karyopharm filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which Amgen had originally filed in December 2018 in a Massachusetts state court.

According to the complaint, Karyopharm hired one of Amgen’s regional sales managers in February 2018 to serve as its vice president of sales. By the end of November, three additional sales managers and one “top-tier salesperson” had left Amgen to join Karyopharm.

The sales managers had access to confidential information about Amgen’s salesforce, so “Karyopharm knew exactly which Amgen salespeople were the top performers and aggressively targeted only those salespeople,” Amgen said in the complaint.

Novartis loses head of oncology to Atara: In another poaching incident, California-based biotech Atara Biotherapeutics has hired Pascal Touchon as its CEO and President. Touchon was senior vice president and global head, cell and gene at Novartis Oncology.

Touchon had helped lead the launch of Novartis’ blood cancer CAR T-cell therapy Kymriah. Atara is a small biotech firm with less than US$ 1 billion in market cap. It is working on off-the-shelf, allogeneic T-cell immunotherapies in cancer.

Such resignations are not new. In 2016, Usman ‘Oz’ Azam had left Novartis to head a T-cell biotech—Tmunity Therapeutics Inc — leaving his position as Novartis’ cell and gene therapy unit lead.

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