On Monday night, Biogen announced a change to its board to add Susan Langer as a director, as longtime member Alex Denner and two others leave the board.
While Langer has a long résumé in biotech, including a corporate role at Biogen, a stint as a VC, and as a company founder, she is also Denner’s longstanding romantic partner, Endpoints News has been told by people familiar with the situation.
A spokesman for Biogen declined to comment on a relationship between Denner and Langer, but did confirm that Denner nominated her to the board.
“She will bring fresh perspective,” Biogen spokesman Jack Cox said, adding that her qualifications had been reviewed by the board prior to her nomination. “As a former Biogen colleague, she also knows the company and the biotech ecosystem very well.”
Denner and Langer did not immediately respond to several attempts by Endpoints to reach both of them for comment on Monday night.
Langer’s nomination was announced just two days before the company’s annual meeting of shareholders, when vote counts for board directors are typically finalized. The company said in a press release that the voting would be postponed by two weeks to June 26 “to give all stockholders sufficient time to review and vote on [the] proposed slate.”
The surprise nomination will almost certainly raise questions. Denner is a former Carl Icahn protégé who helped shake up the Biogen board more than a decade ago. His firm, Sarissa Capital Management, is currently waging proxy battles against other biotechs, including a board makeover and CEO departure at Amarin, and another round of proxy battles with Alkermes, whose shareholder meeting is slated for June 29.
Langer is the only nomination that Biogen disclosed Monday, but the company said two members in addition to Denner are not standing for re-election: Harvard professor Richard Mulligan and compensation and management committee chair William Jones.
Langer had been going by Susan Langer Denner on LinkedIn in recent months, and she had posted about Denner’s Sarissa Capital proxy contest against Amarin on the professional networking site in March. Her LinkedIn profile appears to have been removed or made inaccessible at some point since then.
Her ties to Biogen run deep. She previously was a head of corporate strategy at the Cambridge, MA, company, a role in which the company said she led “execution of more than a dozen corporate transactions.”
The daughter of well-known MIT professor and Moderna co-founder Bob Langer, she and her brother ran Old Silver VC, a venture firm that has backed biotech, digital health and materials sciences companies. She’s now president of stealth mode biotech Soufflé Therapeutics, whose board includes her father and venture capital investors associated with Leaps by Bayer, Vida Ventures, Polaris Partners and others, per Massachusetts corporate filings detailing the biotech’s registration in the state in March 2022 and a listing of directors in March of this year.
Biogen is at a critical moment. After years of scrutiny over its Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm, the biotech and its partner Eisai are expected to win full FDA approval next month for their follow-up drug Leqembi. New CEO Chris Viehbacher has also promised to look at M&A to refill the company’s pipeline.
Other changes to the board were announced in March of this year, when Biogen said that Caroline Dorsa, a former Merck executive, would become chair.
Viehbacher and Dorsa “are committed to building on the company’s great legacy and to putting the company back on a sustainable growth path,” said Cox, the Biogen spokesman. “Having an effective board of directors to represent stockholders is a key element of our strategy, and we look forward to continued dialogue with our investors.”
