Description

In this preview, Marc de Garidel, CEO of Abivax, shares the moment a phase 3 trial delivered results far beyond expectations — a rare scientific milestone that triggered an intense 48-hour sprint and a record-breaking stock surge.

🎧 The full episode drops tomorrow on Pharma minds.

What you will learn in the full episode of tomorrow:

◾️ How Marc stepped into a company with almost no long-term plan… and why that turned out to be a surprising advantage.

◾️ The four pillars of a new strategy — and how one of them quietly set the stage for the breakthrough to come.

◾️ What it really takes to run a global phase 3 across dozens of countries — and why Abivax had to reinvent itself to pull it off.

◾️ A mechanism of action unlike anything else in IBD — and why this difference matters more than most people think.

◾️ The hidden lessons from a noisy phase 2 that helped transform the phase 3 into something no one saw coming.

◾️ A leadership philosophy built on transparency and speed, born from a single principle: in biotech, every day counts.

◾️ The unexpected market reaction that changed the fate of the company overnight — with numbers that almost don’t seem real.

A clear, concrete, and inspiring episode that sheds light on how Europe can regain its leadership in healthcare innovation.

See you tomorrow!

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Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hello everyone and welcome to PharmaMinds, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes with the leading figures in the pharma world. New week, new episode, and here's a sneak peek of the conversation you can catch online starting tomorrow.

• Speaker #1

  But you know what, it was actually a Saturday morning and I said, you know, please text me when I need to come in. So he texts me and on the text, there was actually nothing except, you know, sunshine. So I thought that's probably a good sign that means we made a statistical significant outcome. But what I didn't know is how shiny would be the sun. And so when I came in, he showed me with the team the results. And what was again, what was amazing is our placebo corrected effect was 16% in those two studies compared to 12% in the phase 2b. So in other words, we had a more efficacious drug in phase three than in phase two. And in the history of drug development, that happens very, very rarely. So I don't have the statistics, but it's extremely rare. So the level of surprise was beyond expectation because I thought the best case was 12% to be pretty much at the same level of the phase it has to be because that was part of the changes we made to in the design of the phase three, but we had over, you know, basically overpassed any expectations. So it was fantastic. And then on the safety side, it didn't seem to have, you know, really material adverse events that would...

• Speaker #0

  Same as you... Yeah,

• Speaker #1

  pretty much the same as... We saw, you know, some headaches, you know, early on the first week. But the last, you know, couple of days, you take Tylenol and you're all good. And the rest was, there was no incidence of really any... major manifestation of side effects on anything. So I mean, there are obviously some one-off patients that develop certain conditions, but there were no signals of anything. So it was just an absolutely incredible time. And then as a result, so I called my CFO, I called my head of IR, I said, initially, we had planned to take a week to review the data, you know, to prepare another thing and do basically the financial communication the following weekend. And what we did is we accelerated everything. I said, we need to have a board meeting, you know, on Sunday night. So we, you know, so within a day we had to put all the slides together, people who are literally day and night. And we did the communication on, you know, essentially on Monday night. And on Tuesday, the stock was traded. We actually blocked respectively for 45 minutes, the Euronext, our quotation on Euronext, because it was too much demand. And then when the Nasdaq opened, the same thing happened. I think it was a bit less, 30 minutes. You know, there was too much demand on the stock, and the stock went up that day by 600%. And 600%, you know, no stock on the Nasdaq has ever done that. So it was, I mean, for us, it was like, you know, it's like a Hollywood movie, you know. Is it true?

• Speaker #0

  If you enjoyed this snippet, remember to subscribe on this app and turn on the notifications to be the first to know when the full episode is out. Wishing you a fantastic listening experience and I'll see you soon on PharmaMinds.