Pfizer is staking its turnaround on cancer drugs

Ten of the new Pfizer employees in the large conference room pulled out Ray-Ban sunglasses that had been taped under their seats and put them on, as colleagues in the crowd laughed.

“The future is bright for everyone in oncology," said Chris Boshoff, Pfizer’s chief oncology officer, donning his own pair of the black Wayfarers.

Pfizer is counting on it. The drugmaker is betting much of its future on cancer drugs, wagering they can ring up billions of dollars in new sales and turn around a company struggling with falling Covid-19 revenue and the lower-priced competition that looms for some big-selling products.

Seagen, whose Seattle-area offices Boshoff was visiting, is central to Pfizer’s cancer strategy. Through its purchase of the biotech, Pfizer got three next-generation cancer therapies on the market and at least a dozen drugs in development.

Pfizer expects Seagen drugs, known as antibody drug conjugates or ADCs, to generate $10 billion in annual sales by 2030.

The company needs a win. One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies by sales, Pfizer had enjoyed unusual gains during the pandemic thanks to its Covid-19 vaccine, developed with BioNTech. Revenue in 2022 topped $100 billion. But after the pandemic emergency receded, Pfizer miscalculated demand for its Covid-19 vaccine and drug. Sales from several new drug launches underwhelmed, and the company’s first stab at a closely watched weight-loss pill faltered.

Wall Street soured. Pfizer stock is down more than 50% since its record high during the pandemic, a loss of $180 billion in market value. At least $4 billion in cost cutting failed to lift investor sentiment, while layoffs hurt morale inside the company.

Success rests on the shoulders of Boshoff, an accomplished but spotlight-shy cancer researcher whose knowledge of the disease has earned him the nickname Oncopedia and whose strong people skills have propelled his rise at Pfizer since he joined the company in 2013.

Boshoff was recently installed in a new, executive role overseeing both Pfizer’s cancer R&D and marketing. “He’s got something rare for a scientist: He’s a very good manager," Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said.

Incorporating the nimble Seagen into corporate Pfizer—and advancing the biotech’s cancer-drug technology to new and broader cancer uses—will be a stiff management test. And the $211 billion cancer-drug market is fiercely competitive.

Above all, Boshoff must find a way to keep Seagen’s talent from leaving. Mass departures usually follow acquisitions by big pharmaceutical companies. The workers behind a biotech’s success don’t want to work in a large bureaucracy and often depart, taking their expertise with them.

Boshoff said he aims to preserve Seagen’s culture and cutting-edge science, while holding on to its researchers, by letting Seagen operate as a biotech within Pfizer. He aims to spur the company-inside-the-company to find additional uses for the biotech’s drugs and develop a new generation of the medicines.

Roughly half of Boshoff’s leadership team comes from Seagen. Its logo still adorns some walls, and scientists from Seagen and Pfizer are writing papers together.

“They have the secret sauce to develop successful ADCs," Boshoff said.

Seagen pioneered ADCs, which connect chemotherapy to a cancer-homing antibody so it can directly attack tumors with toxins, sparing healthy cells. It took Seagen decades to work out the kinks in the technology. Now its drugs are approved to fight lymphomas as well as bladder, cervical and other cancers.

Boshoff, 61 years old, grew up in South Africa and studied to be a doctor. Before joining Pfizer, he built an academic career kicked off by the charitable trust of Freddie Mercury, the late Queen singer, who was suffering from a rare cancer called Kaposi sarcoma when he died.

The trust helped fund Boshoff’s initial salary as a doctoral student at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, so he could research the disease. Later, his lab at University College London contributed breakthroughs to discoveries on the origins of Kaposi sarcoma, as well as a key gene that protects against lung cancer.

After joining Pfizer’s San Diego laboratories, Boshoff combined a detailed knowledge of cancer with empathy for its victims, according to people who worked with him. He discussed data with bench scientists in labs and distilled it into sound bites for Pfizer’s board. He also accompanied colleagues who had been diagnosed with the disease to doctor’s visits and treatments.

Boshoff didn’t seek the spotlight, according to people who worked with him. He is known to skip big Pfizer affairs, preferring smaller groups for socializing, and keep to the back of the room at corporate gatherings.

His reputation inside the company grew due to his deft skills navigating the Pfizer bureaucracy and championing, over internal dissent, experimental drugs that turned out to be successful.

Among them was a lung-cancer drug called Lorbrena, which some people inside the company didn’t consider a priority because there were rival treatments already on sale and the market wasn’t big. Lorbrena won approval in 2018. Analysts expect the drug to generate more than $1 billion in sales in 2027.

Boshoff was a leading voice in Pfizer to acquire Seagen, according to people familiar with the matter. Pfizer now has five of the 11 ADCs on the market. One of them, Padcev for bladder cancer, should generate roughly $4 billion in annual sales by 2029, according to analysts.

Boshoff said he wants more research into how ADCs work in combination with other drugs, including immunotherapies and targeted therapies. “There’s a lot of opportunity, to refine, to optimize, to get the best possible medicines in the tumor microenvironment," he said.

His other priority is merging Seagen into Pfizer’s cancer division with minimal disruption. “You can’t do anything if people are not happy," he said in an interview. “You can’t do anything if you don’t have colleagues that are talented, that are motivated, that are driven by purpose."

During a recent visit to Seagen’s offices, he mingled with the biotech’s rank-and-file during lunchtime at the company’s parking lot, where local food trucks had parked.

Wearing the same Ray-Bans from the town hall and sipping on a flavored seltzer, he chatted up workers, telling them he was a space enthusiast and confiding he sometimes looks through his telescope into the night sky.

In Pfizer’s cancer business, Boshoff is trying to introduce some changes to make drug development easier and faster. He is giving employees greater autonomy by dropping managerial approval for certain decisions and helping arm commercial teams with scientific data faster to help with selling drugs.

He is also using artificial intelligence to help build a comprehensive oncology dashboard combining data sets from study results to trial recruitment progress to rivals’ own research.

When Boshoff met with deputies at Seagen after the sunglass town hall, Roger Dansey, a former Seagen official now running Pfizer’s cancer-drug trials, urged caution making employees learn too many new programs at once.

“They’re trying to find their way to the bathroom," he said. “Now we’re offering three other versions of a bathroom."

At the meeting, Boshoff discussed how Seagen workers prematurely uploaded information about development of a lung cancer drug to a public government website of clinical trials. A trade publication reported the news, which Pfizer wouldn’t have wanted because of rival companies finding out.

Boshoff said he wasn’t angry. Seagen may have had different procedures, he said. He said the companies would work together more closely going forward.

Write to Jared S. Hopkins at jared.hopkins@wsj.com