The Biogen Idec boardroom battle continues to rage on. Mere months after billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn succeeded in getting two of his endorsed directors elected to the board, two of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company’s scientific directors have resigned. In July, Phillip Sharp, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-founder of Biogen, relinquished his spot on the board after serving for 27 years. And last month, Cecil Pickett, president of research and development, announced that he would retire from both his full-time day job and the board on 5 October. Both men were not due to step down until 2011.
Nature spoke with Pickett about his decision to resign prematurely. (Sharp declined to be interviewed.)
Did Carl Icahn’s attempted takeover of the board influence your decision to retire early?
Not really, the plan all along was just a four-year tenure. That’s how I went into it. I cut my job short because I just thought I had accomplished everything I could in the timeframe I had actually given it. We did a lot to build up the mid-stage pipeline and the small molecule discovery efforts, we did some licensing deals, and I did some significant recruiting where there were some weak spots. And given all the flux in the industry I thought it might be a good time to go out and recruit my successor.
Why step down from the board in addition to your role as chief of R&D?
I just felt that my successor needs to have some operational room in the organization. I didn’t want to be put in the position by the board that every time a decision is made by the head of R&D I get asked: ‘Well, is that right?’
How did you feel about being accused of failed leadership by Carl Icahn and his representatives?
I didn’t like it. Some of the new board members are actually making statements in isolation. They don’t know the R&D organization. They’ve never discovered, developed or commercialized a drug. What they were criticizing was the lack of productivity of Biogen Idec’s R&D organization. Well, obviously that’s the reason they asked me to join, and I think we did a pretty good job of building up the pipeline.
Who do you think should fill your seat on the board of directors?
My recommendation to the board would be to recruit someone with senior R&D experience that’s either come out of large Pharma or one of the major biotechs. Unless you’ve been involved in the trenches of drug development, it’s very hard to evaluate an R&D organization.
What’s in store your you after 5 October when you step down?
That day is my 64th birthday. But after that, I’m getting asked to do a lot of different things, from small biotechs to giving advice to sitting on boards. I’ve been an adjunct professor at Rutgers for years and I have an office waiting for me, and I probably will try and interact with students. But I just want to take a little bit of time — it’s been a hectic 32 years — and just think about some of the things that are actually being offered.