Age 37 might be old for a “coming-out party,” but that’s the situation for Alkermes at this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, chief operating officer Blair Jackson said in an interview.
After the most transformational year the history of the Dublin, Ireland, drugmaker, Alkermes is stripped down and anxious to carry on in its new role as a pure-play neuroscience specialist.
“2023 was a year of resetting and clearing the decks and simplifying the story,” Jackson said. “We’ve always been a neuroscience company at our core. But we had all this complexity and it was hard for investors to get their arms around.”
Alkermes eliminated the complexity in 2023. Two months ago, the company completed its split from its cancer business, creating an independent, publicly traded, clinical-stage company called Mural Oncology.
Then, less than four weeks ago, Alkermes sold its development and manufacturing facility in Athlone, Ireland—it’s lone site in its home country—to Novo Nordisk for $92.5 million.
Those divestitures came after Alkermes won a lucrative arbitration battle with Johnson & Johnson, adding $425 million to its revenue in 2023, as it was ruled that the pharma giant owed royalties on products that were developed with Alkermes’ NanoCrystal technology platform.
Then in August, Alkermes settled a patent case with Teva, which allows the Israeli drugmaker to sell a biosimilar version of Alkermes’ alcohol and opioid dependence drug Vivitrol in 2027, two years ahead of its loss of patent protection.
While much of this was happening, Alkermes was fending off activist investor Sarissa, which failed in its bid to secure three seats on the company’s board.
After all the tumult, Alkermes is happy to be settled and focused on its core business.
“This is a really nice, clean year for us,” Jackson said. “Hopefully we can sigh a little bit as we execute our next plan.”
Much of the plan revolves around maximizing the commercial opportunities for the schizophrenia and bipolar disorder drug Lybalvi, which was approved in 2021. Lybalvi generated $51 million in the third quarter of last year, and Alkermes believes the drug can eventually become a blockbuster.
“We have a unique product in the space,” Jackson said. “I think we’re at the very, very beginning of our growth phase with this. It’s really about education, having physicians use it, having experience with it. We see when they do that, they reorder it, they find more patients for it.”
In its pipeline, Alkermes is anxious to enter phase 2 study of ALKS 2680 in narcolepsy. The pill is an orexin agonist that works on the brain’s wakefulness circuitry.
“We think we have the lead asset within that space from a design perspective so now it’s about just executing and getting the clinical data to support that,” Jackson said.