Biohaven CEO's Unique Business Approach: A Neuroscience Innovator Who Doesn't Follow the Conventional Path
Biohaven CEO Vlad Coric never plays by the rules. After selling the migraine blockbuster drug Nurtec to Pfizer for $11.6 billion, he chose to return the company to a small, agile, clinically driven model, focusing on unmet areas such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and epilepsy. This article reveals his unique 'fast follower' strategy, unconventional business deal designs, and his steadfast belief in neuroscience drug development.
Vlad Coric doesn't always follow the traditional rules of the pharmaceutical industry—but that doesn't mean the Biohaven CEO hasn't achieved numerous successes in the field. In fact, Coric recently led the company through a $11.6 billionacquisition deal with Pfizer, which gained access to its blockbuster migraine drug Nurtec.
Throughout his career, Coric has deliberately avoided some of the industry's mainstream business strategies. And Biohaven, from its founding in 2013—a company born out of Coric's research in neuroscience—chose to swim against the current.
"Everyone is leaving the neuroscience field. What makes you think you can survive here?" he recalls people asking him at the time. "But our entire team poured all their heart into this field, and (we) proved we could do it."
When Nurtec was approved in 2020 and garnered$462 million in sales in 2021—a 600% increasefrom the previous year—Coric also resisted the temptation to bet everything on growth. Although Biohaven could have ridden the wave of Nurtec's revenue to expand into a larger commercial enterprise, that wasn't what Coric wanted.
"If you're in a big pharma company, what people care about is: What kind of office do you have? How many direct reports do you have? That's how you measure your importance," he said. "But that's not how we do things at Biohaven."
While Coric acknowledges the industry needs "companies like Pfizer" to help drugs reach more patients, he believes Biohaven should play a different role—remaining a smaller, more agile, patient-driven enterprise.
"We want to do for patients with conditions like OCD and epilepsy what we did for migraine patients."
Vlad Coric
CEO of Biohaven
"Being under pressure is good for staying healthy. We want to be active in innovation," he explained. "It's also a bit daunting. When we had Nurtec, we didn't have to rely on external financing. But that's who we are. We want to be an innovative, entrepreneurial engine."
On October 4, the company officially set sail anew, no longer holding Nurtec and its CGRP product portfolio. Now, Biohaven has returned to its core clinical development work with OCD and epilepsy as its main candidates. The question is: Can Coric and the company win another major victory?
Born for Neuroscience
Coric's background gives him a unique advantage in neuroscience drug development.
"My father was a psychiatrist and my mother was a pharmacist," he explained. "From a very young age, I became interested in the biology behind behavior."
Coric eventually followed in his father's footsteps to become a psychiatrist, treating a range of conditions from OCD to bipolar disorder. At the same time, he saw that innovation in drug treatment had nearly stalled.
"The treatment regimens are resistant to patients. (The patients) aren't treatment-resistant. We don't understand (these diseases), we've failed them," he said.
He served as an assistant professor at Yale for a long time and conducted R&D in the clinical neuroscience research department. But to master the core skills of drug development, Coric eventually realized he needed to make the leap from academia to industry, so he joined Bristol-Myers Squibb, gaining experience across multiple therapeutic areas.
He was also involved in bringing immuno-oncology to the forefront of clinical practice, with therapies like Yervoy and Opdivo. However, despite the industry's enthusiasm for these breakthroughs, Coric couldn't stop thinking about the unfinished work in neuroscience.
"The thought 'If all pharmaceutical companies stop focusing on neuroscience, where will these treatments come from?' kept haunting me," he recalled.
On the positive side, as many large pharmaceutical companies exited the neuroscience field, numerous experienced scientists were looking for new job opportunities. Coric also realized this was a unique opportunity to bring together top talent in the field. After assembling a "dream team" of leading figures in CNS drug development, Biohaven was born under Coric's leadership.
The "Fast Follower" Strategy
Biohaven initially focused on Coric's research at Yale on glutamate modulators and developed a drug called troriluzole. The drug is currently in late-stage clinical trialsfor OCD and spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA). SCA is a group of rare neurodegenerative diseases with no approved treatments.
However, while Biohaven advanced this high-risk, potentially first-in-class therapy, Coric also recognized that entering other emerging mechanisms as a "fast follower" could add safer options to the pipeline. After seeing AbbVie succeed in the migraine space with a CGRP drug, Biohaven quickly launched its own similar compound, believing it to be superior. Despite AbbVie's 18-month lead, Biohaven caught up with its CGRP candidate—which proved more effective in both acute and preventive treatment. Coric says Nurtec now dominates the CGRP migraine market and is heading toward an expected peak annual sales of around $6 billion.
The company has applied the same strategy to its Kv7 drug portfolio for epilepsy and other CNS and pain conditions. Although Xenon Pharmaceuticals initially advanced the development of Kv7 drugs—which work by targeting potassium channels to reduce overactivity in different brain regions—Coric says Biohaven has improved upon the approach, with its candidates potentially being more effective and having fewer side effects.
This pipeline diversification strategy has also helped Biohaven weather major setbacks.
In September, the company announcedthat its novel candidate verdiperstat failed to meet the primary endpoint in a trial for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Earlier, troriluzole also failed to meet the primary efficacy endpoint in a Phase 3 clinical trialin the overall SCA population. Coric says the data shows troriluzole is effective in patients with a specific genotype, and the company is discussing next steps for the therapy with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
"That's just the norm of working in neuroscience," he said. "But your successes will help fund your failures."
A New Business Model
One of Coric's unique moves in the pharmaceutical industry was the deal with Pfizer—one of the largest transactions in the industry last year. Rather than acquiring all of Biohaven outright, or just a single asset, Pfizer acquired Biohaven's CGRP portfolio and spun off Biohaven as a new company, with Pfizer holding a small stake. Coric says his team proactively proposed this arrangement to protect its carefully assembled drug development team from being dismantled, and Pfizer readily agreed.
"Albert (Bourla) called and said: 'We want you to continue contributing to neuroscience, and if you succeed in the future, that would be fantastic,'" Coric recalled. "Now, I hear many people in the industry saying other companies are also seeking this type of deal."
In designing this unusual deal structure, Coric says his deep experience in R&D played a role. He points out that business leaders should bring the same curiosity and skepticism they hold in the lab into the boardroom.
"You have to ask: Why are we making certain decisions? What we do should be questioned," he explained. "I try to innovate not only in science, but also in business practices. That's how we improve every level of the company."
Of course, Biohaven's focus remains on the science itself. For Coric, who still sees patients as a psychiatrist, the goal isn't to make incremental improvements but to pioneer paradigm-shifting treatments. With two Phase 3 trials of troriluzole for OCD underway, Coric is hopeful the company is on the verge of a breakthrough in that area.
"If you're not among the one-third of OCD patients who respond to SSRIs, there are almost no other options besides neurosurgery..." he said. "We want to help more patients return to normal function. We believe troriluzole can achieve that in OCD treatment. We want to do for patients with conditions like OCD and epilepsy what we did for migraine patients."