Roivant’s Gline: From spin-cos to commercial conviction
CEO Matt Gline on upcoming launch, portfolio construction, and AI in biotech R&D
Roivant CEO Matt Gline calls the company’s move beyond spinning out subsidiary “vants” to concentrating on late-stage development and commercial priorities less a pivot than an evolution toward an original goal, which could soon be realized with the approval and launch of brepocitinib this year.
Gline became CEO of Roivant Sciences Ltd. (NASDAQ:ROIV) in 2021, after joining the company as CFO in 2016. Speaking on The BioCentury Show, Gline discussed how Roivant’s initial hub-and-spoke approach — and the capital from selling assets to biopharma companies — has provided the foundation needed for the company to develop and commercialize its portfolio now.
Gline frames this as a natural development for the company. “In some ways, where we’re at right now represents the privilege of our past successes. We’ve finally reached a point where we can do the thing that I think we would’ve said we wanted to do from the beginning, we just didn’t quite have the right combination of capital and assets and opportunity,” Gline told BioCentury. “It’s a bet on ourselves, and I think we’re ready for it,” he added.
With a PDUFA date in the third quarter, Roivant, through subsidiary Priovant Therapeutics Inc., expects to launch its dual selective JAK-1/TYK2 inhibitor brepocitinib for dermatomyositis in late September, aiming to follow in other large orphan indications.
Gline said that the vant model will continue, but the company’s bets need to be bigger.
“We will continue to find new assets, build new vants, because that’s the only way, through a long Darwinian experiment, that we’ve ever been able to successfully do anything — via the vant model where we put a lot of faith and accountability on a nimble team to run an independent endeavor,” Gline said, emphasizing that Roivant will always be looking to create new opportunities.
Now, with a $25 billion market cap, which has increased from $15 billion in January, a 10x return on investment is no longer what it used to be, Gline noted.
He laid out the capital allocation math. With a company valued at $5 billion, a 10x return on $200 million is a 40% increase in the company’s value — “a great outcome.” But now, “at $25 billion, that’s a less than 10% increase in the value of our business, and it is no easier to do that at our current size than it was before,” he said, noting the scale has changed. “We need to take bigger swings for it to be worth the focus. So I think that is a change for us. But the one thing about biotech that isn't stupid is that there are big swings to take, right?” Gline said.
“We will continue to find new assets, build new vants, because that’s the only way, through a long Darwinian experiment, that we’ve ever been able to successfully do anything.”
A bet that hasn’t played out yet for Roivant is investment in tech-enabled and AI-enabled drug discovery.
Gline told BioCentury, “As an investment strategy for Roivant, it was not particularly successful; that is, it has not been a major driver of our value.”
The company has spun out a number of vants that use AI discovery, like VantAI Inc. (Proxima) and PsiThera Inc., and Gline said all employees have access to Claude and other enterprise-level AI tools, which he thinks has helped with things like managing emails, patient enrollment, and handling documents.
“Would I call Roivant an AI-enabled drug development company? Absolutely,” he said.
But in general, he believes AI discovery efforts have not affirmed their value yet, attributing this, in part, to AI solving the “fruit at the bottom of the tree,” while discovering a new drug is “the hardest of the hard problems to solve with AI.” He said that it’s “a composite of 150 different difficult problems, and each of those problems, at present, requires bespoke AI solutions.”
Gline noted, “AI for drug discovery is an idea whose time is coming but isn’t quite here yet.”
He believes this can be attributed to a lack of biological data — and the lack of ability to solve all the problems at once. Gline said, “We don’t actually know what happens if you modulate most protein targets in people. The data doesn’t exist. No matter how much data you throw into a model, it may never be able to answer that question unless we run certain science experiments.”
Gline also discussed the science behind Roivant’s next most advanced program, Phase III anti-FcRN mAb imeroprubart (IMVT-1402) from Immunovant Inc. (NASDAQ:IMVT), which is in development for Graves’ disease. And he shared lessons he’s taking from a “graduating class” of biotechs that have launched programs, like Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:ALNY) and Argenx S.E. (Euronext:ARGX; NASDAQ:ARGX); what he thinks success looks like five years from now for Roivant; and how he believes China’s biopharma innovation has only been for global good.