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2023 Year in Review: CEO Yvonne Greenstreet Reflects on a Year of Substantial Growth and Progress
April 2, 2024
Yvonne Greenstreet, MD, MBA, OBE
CEO, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
2023 was a year marked by a strong financial performance, excellent commercial execution, and exciting advances in our pipeline and platform. Most importantly, we helped to transform the lives of more than 5,000 patients around the world with our medicines.
I am so excited about Alnylam and the enormous promise we hold. We have come far in our quest to transform the extraordinary science of RNA interference into a new class of medicines, but we are only just beginning. In the near term, we are on track to meet the five-year goals we laid out in our Alnylam P5 X 25 strategy. These goals reflect our ambition to establish ourselves as a top-tier biotechnology company and increase the value we deliver to our shareholders and to society.
I'm pleased to note some highlights from last year that underscore the strong progress we made across our business below and invite you to read more in our 2023 annual report.
Continued Commercial Success – We achieved $1.2 billion in global net product revenues, an increase of 39 percent compared with the previous year. This growth was driven by increasing demand within our portfolio of products—ONPATTRO® (patisiran), AMVUTTRA® (vutrisiran), GIVLAARI® (givosiran), and OXLUMO® (lumasiran)—along with strong commercial execution by our teams in delivering these important medicines to patients in need globally. Royalty revenue also increased, as sales of Leqvio® (inclisiran), an Alnylam-discovered RNAi-therapeutic marketed by Novartis in nearly 100 countries, continued to grow steadily.
On a Path to Sustained Profitability – We ended the year with a cash and investment balance of approximately $2.4 billion and moved closer to achieving our goal of sustained profitability by the end of 2025. Delivering ongoing profitable growth will enable us to continue to build the company, realize the huge promise of our pipeline, and deliver breakthrough medicines for patients for many years to come.
Advancing our Clinical Pipeline – We also made strong progress in advancing potential new medicines across our rapidly expanding pipeline.
- This includes zilebisiran, an investigational RNAi therapeutic in development to treat hypertension in patients at high cardiovascular risk. We reported positive topline results from the KARDIA-1 Phase 2 study of zilebisiran, building on results from the Phase 1 study, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
- We also entered into an exciting strategic partnership with Roche, which will allow us to develop zilebisiran in a more robust way, benefit from Roche’s global footprint and experience in developing and commercializing therapies in complex markets, and ultimately reach as many patients as possible.
- In addition, we shared encouraging early findings for several other programs targeting more prevalent diseases. We reported positive interim results for the ongoing Phase 1 study of ALN-APP in patients with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, the first ever clinical demonstration of gene silencing in the human brain using an RNAi therapeutic. We also reported positive initial Phase 1 data for ALN-KHK, an exciting investigational RNAi therapeutic in development for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus, an area of continued unmet need globally.
Looking forward in ATTR Amyloidosis – While we made great progress across our clinical pipeline last year, we were disappointed to receive a Complete Response Letter for patisiran for the treatment of cardiomyopathy of ATTR amyloidosis. We remain deeply committed to patients with this disease and look forward to reporting topline results from the Phase 3 HELIOS-B study evaluating vutrisiran for this indication this year. Our ambition is to establish Alnylam as the leader in the treatment of ATTR amyloidosis and vutrisiran as THE rapid knockdown therapy for patients with all forms of ATTR amyloidosis.
Our Sustainable Innovation Engine – At our annual R&D Day, we highlighted important advances in our RNAi platform supporting our goal to deliver therapeutics to many new tissues in the body, including adipose tissue and muscle tissue and and tumors, allowing us to broadly expand the range of diseases we aim to treat. Given these advances in our platform, we anticipate doubling the size of our clinical pipeline by the end of next year, as we look to file Investigational New Drug (IND) applications for nine new programs, supplemented by an additional six IND applications from our partners.
Our People and Culture – As we grow, we continue to focus on the foundation and heart of Alnylam: our culture and people. We are keen to sustain our entrepreneurial ‘challenge-accepted’ spirit as we build the company to operate effectively on a larger scale. We also aim to be a global leader in diversity, equity, and inclusion and to build an exceptional workplace that inspires and attracts innovative and ambitious people dedicated to advancing breakthrough medicines that transform lives and solve major healthcare challenges. We were recognized again this year as a top place to work by numerous publications, including The Boston Globe and Science magazine, while also being certified as a Great Place to Work in ten countries and ranking among Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Women and included on the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index.
Our Corporate Responsibility – We continued to earn recognition for our corporate responsibility efforts. We were included on Newsweek’s list of America’s Most Socially Responsible Companies and maintained our ‘A’ ESG rating with MSCI. We outlined our strong commitment in this area with the release of our third Corporate Responsibility Report, which described our efforts to enable broad access to our medicines, highlighted our entrepreneurial and community partnerships that are addressing health inequities, and detailed the progress we have made in reducing our environmental impact.
Alnylam continues to lead the wave of RNAi innovation that is changing medicine. I am so excited about our future and the enormous promise we hold to change the lives of patients around the world. As we look ahead to next year and the years to come, I feel that we are at just the beginning of an extraordinary journey.
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