The healthcare investment firm Deerfield Management recruited a top pharma scientist to lead its growing research arm, which has sprawling connections to many of the nation’s top academic centers, including the Broad Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Johns Hopkins and Stanford.
Frank Nestle, who stepped down as chief scientific officer and global head of research at Sanofi in May, joined Deerfield as a partner and CEO of its New York City drug incubator, the firm announced Wednesday.
“It’s what I would call an evergreen R&D engine in the making,” Nestle told Endpoints News in an interview during his second day on the job. “I think of it a bit like an incubator or accelerator, turning scientific ideas into molecules and ultimately into medicines.”
Deerfield Discovery and Development, also called 3DC, has quietly built a pipeline of more than two dozen molecules. Nestle wouldn’t disclose any details on those preclinical programs or say when they might enter clinical tests. Prioritizing which ones to focus on will be a big part of his job in the days ahead.
Many, but not all, of those programs come from 25 small companies that Deerfield has created and embedded in elite academic institutions and medical centers, granting the firm a front-row seat to cutting-edge science. Deerfield has committed up to $65 million or $130 million to these companies over a ten-year period. The firm’s commitments now total more than $2.3 billion.
Many of them solicit research proposals from scientists at the institutions with an eye toward funding projects that could form the basis of a new drug or diagnostic. Some of those ideas are now making their way into 3DC’s pipeline.
“It’s a unique opportunity for scientists and founders to work with Deerfield,” Nestle said.
Nestle played a key role in expanding Sanofi’s investment in immunology, which has increasingly become a core focus for the company due to the commercial success of Dupixent, which was developed with Regeneron and is approved in multiple immune conditions and in studies for several more.
He also championed the integration of artificial intelligence across Sanofi’s operations before ChatGPT sparked an AI boom, he said.
“Even before the world was waking up to the fact that AI is something you ignore at your peril, we built that into the drug discovery and development value chain, everything from target identification to molecular design to patient indication finding,” Nestle said. It’s a focus that he plans to bring to Deerfield, too.
“It’s absolutely clear that AI and automation will change the industry,” he said. “Hopefully, it will make it more productive and innovative. But in five years’ time, if it does, it will be too late to join.”