It’s changing of the guard time at pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb. On Wednesday, CEO Giovanni Caforio will step down. He’ll be replaced by Christopher Boerner, who is currently chief operating officer.
When Caforio took over in May 2015, Bristol was known as a big pharmaceutical firm with the high-flying stock of a biotechnology company, largely due to its role as the company that brought cancer immunotherapy to market. But Bristol stumbled in 2016 when its immunotherapy Opdivo failed to help patients with non-small cell cancer more than chemotherapy. Opdivo remained a big seller, but its failure allowed Merck’s rival Keytruda to move into position to become the best-selling medicine in the world. In 2019, Caforio tried to flip the script, buying the biotech Celgene for $74 billion.
STAT recently sat down with Caforio, 59, to look back on what went wrong and right with his tenure. He also reflected on what it meant to be a physician — and the son of a physician. “We were speaking about patient stories over lunch and dinner, when I was a kid, and I think that drove my passion for medicine,” he said.
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