Bill Haney, Skyhawk

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With Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Celgene buyout all but complete, the BD teams are working in perfect synchrony now. The Celgene side is going back to Skyhawk, a darling of the crowd that set out to drug RNA, and they’re adding a suite of new programs that mesh perfectly with the new regime in charge.

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Celgene is shelling out $80 million in a cash upfront to add oncology, immuno-oncology and autoimmune diseases to the initial roundup of neurological targets mapped early in Skyhawk’s existence.

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Skyhawk CEO Bill Haney tends to keep large segments of the financials in his preclinical deals under wraps — standard for the big biopharmas he’s been working with. But he’s happy to confirm my own back-of-the-envelope math that he’s now garnered $350 million to $400 million in upfront payments to build the company — a significant sum for a company that has yet to try a drug on a human.

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Milestones now lie somewhere north of $15 billion. And by any account, the roster of pacts he’s inked in the last 2 years put him at the top of the list of the most active dealmakers in the industry. That’s impressive for a documentary maker, entrepreneur and CEO of 2 biotechs — both of which have some landmark news to report today.

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Haney’s other job is running Dragonfly, and today they’re making their first foray into human studies, with the launch of a Phase I study for their lead drug DF1001 in HER2 expressing solid tumors. This is the first of their TriNKET platform drugs to go into humans, and Vessey stepped up with $12 million for Celgene’s third option from Dragonfly.

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So why was the biotech newcomer able to jump out in front on dealmaking?

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Rupert Vessey, Celgene

“There aren’t that many genuinely novel platforms,” Haney says about Skyhawk. His scientist friends and associates — a group that includes Tyler Jacks at MIT’s Koch Institute — haven’t hurt. And he likes to keep the values simple: Stay focused on patients, stay humble, don’t get ahead of yourself or the organization — with 55 staffers and around 100 FTEs around the world — in rolling out alliances.

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Technically, both Bristol-Myers and Celgene have to continue to operate as independent entities. But this deal fell into Rupert Vessey’s domain, who will make the transition from Celgene to head of early- and mid-stage R&D at Bristol-Myers, where oncology, I-O and autoimmune diseases are core fields.

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“We see Skyhawk’s platform as a key disruptive technology that will support the autoimmune, oncology and immuno-oncology pipelines of the company we are today, and the company we are planning to be,” said Vessey, in a prepared statement that makes the seamless nature of the alliance apparent.

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Skyhawk Contact
Maura McCarthy
Head of Corporate Development
maura@skyhawktx.com