Chris Viehbacher

Chris Viehbacher is a year and change into biotech’s highest-profile turnaround act, taking the helm of Biogen after an ill-fated bet in Alzheimer’s disease nearly pushed the company to the brink. After spending his early months shuffling the leadership ranks, refreshing the board, and cutting deep into the company’s spending, Viehbacher has outlined a more pragmatic future for a company whose previous reliance on moonshot science left it lurching from crisis to crisis. Biogen’s foundational interest in neuroscience isn’t going to change, but Viehbacher also sees a future in the comparatively less risky areas of immunology and rare disease. “There’s a huge amount of pride inside the company that we go after problems other people don’t,” Viehbacher said at the 2023 STAT Summit, “but at the end of the day you also have to get medicines through the pipeline to benefit patients, and that’s why we’re expanding the aperture of what we’re doing in R&D.”