YoIn the pharmaceutical world, where ideas far outnumber marketable products, executives adhere to the motto of “fail often and fail early,” with the understanding that doing so requires discipline to know when to cut losses and say no. Cheung followed other advice as CEO of Eisai, Inc. “The opposite is also true,” he says. “You have to have the discipline to say yes when everyone is trying to tell you to say no.”
Cheung took a big risk in 2019 when he decided to continue developing lecanemab, which became the second treatment approved to address the root causes of Alzheimer’s disease, when data from aducanumab, which works similarly, showed conflicting results and experts They questioned the approach. . But Cheung’s team showed him promising initial results with his drug, and he trusted the data. “Multiple aspects of the data told us that we needed to move forward,” he says.
That conviction proved prescient when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved lecanemab in 2023 and the maker of aducanumab decided to stop making it the following year. But Cheung’s work was not over; Medicare initially did not reimburse for the drug, but he worked with patient advocates to advocate for coverage and got it six months later.
Cheung, who is now CEO of NextPoint Therapeutics, where he oversees promising cancer treatments, sees lecanemab as the first in what is expected to be a series of potent therapies for the memory disorder. “You always need an initial spark, and I believe lecanemab provided the spark that will lead to more therapeutic options, more diagnostic options, and more screening options to create an entire ecosystem to improve care for people living with Alzheimer’s,” Cheung says. .