John Maraganore
Former CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals · Biotech entrepreneur
aka John Morganori
“the news this week for Lilly was around the Thai acquisition... a $3.8 billion acquisition, 2.8 billion upfront and 1 billion linked to a... CBR... it's a category that is proving to be pretty important for people with... treatment resistant depression.”
“go from something that's a traditional drug maker to something that's frankly closer to a tech company... a big part of that is their shift to focusing on prevention of disease as opposed to treatment of disease... Lilly Direct which integrates telehealth and direct to consumer based strategy, effectively going around the PBMs.”
“$3,800 per year compared to roughly, you know, 5 to $6,000 per year for the, for the antibodies in the SRNA products that are currently on the market.”
“the nature of this inverted dose response is due once again to the poor tolerability that one sees with ASOs versus other technologies. And that's why Arrowhead with what they're doing. And also Al Nylam has a program targeting Tau which is intrathecal. Arrowhead's program is a Trans BBB shuttle.”
“we also notably saw the Eplan Turin fail in cardio transform last week which again a reminder ASOs have tolerability issues and they could be contributing to mixed interpretations of overall results.”
John Maraganore
One-line summary: Founding CEO of Alnylam; serial biotech entrepreneur on the Biotech Hangout roundtable; tracked here for RNAi/ASO modality, cardiometabolic (PCSK9) and Lilly-strategy reads.
What they're known for
Founding CEO of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (he built the first approved RNAi therapeutics company) and a serial biotech entrepreneur/board member; a regular on the Biotech Hangout roundtable. On the July 17 2026 episode he referenced building a company ("Coursera"/Korro) developing a once-yearly PCSK9 + angiotensinogen siRNA for cardiovascular prevention.
Why they matter to stock-market
Maraganore is the panel's deepest RNAi/ASO-modality voice, so his reads carry weight on: (1) why ASOs keep disappointing (tolerability-driven inverted dose responses — diranersen tau, eplontersen ATTR-CM), which points value toward siRNA / brain-shuttle alternatives; (2) the oral-PCSK9 class economics and the prevention-vs-treatment shift; and (3) Lilly's "Amazonification" — its move toward a tech-company posture, prevention focus, and PBM-bypassing direct-to-consumer channel.
Said
Speaker-attributed claims extracted from diarized sources. Each bullet mirrors one entry in quotes: frontmatter — keep them in sync.
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On eli-lilly:
"the news this week for Lilly was around the Thai acquisition... a $3.8 billion acquisition, 2.8 billion upfront and 1 billion linked to a... CBR... it's a category that is proving to be pretty important for people with... treatment resistant depression." — 2026-07-17-podcast-biotech-hangout-episode-189-july-17-2026 (2026-07-17)
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On eli-lilly, pbm-profit-pool-migration:
"go from something that's a traditional drug maker to something that's frankly closer to a tech company... a big part of that is their shift to focusing on prevention of disease as opposed to treatment of disease... Lilly Direct which integrates telehealth and direct to consumer based strategy, effectively going around the PBMs." — 2026-07-17-podcast-biotech-hangout-episode-189-july-17-2026 (2026-07-17)
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On oral-pcsk9-class-disruption:
"$3,800 per year compared to roughly, you know, 5 to $6,000 per year for the, for the antibodies in the SRNA products that are currently on the market." — 2026-07-17-podcast-biotech-hangout-episode-189-july-17-2026 (2026-07-17)
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On biogen-tau-failure-to-brain-shuttle-rerate:
"the nature of this inverted dose response is due once again to the poor tolerability that one sees with ASOs versus other technologies. And that's why Arrowhead with what they're doing. And also Al Nylam has a program targeting Tau which is intrathecal. Arrowhead's program is a Trans BBB shuttle." — 2026-07-17-podcast-biotech-hangout-episode-189-july-17-2026 (2026-07-17)
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On eplontersen-failure-to-alnylam-silencer-consolidation:
"we also notably saw the Eplan Turin fail in cardio transform last week which again a reminder ASOs have tolerability issues and they could be contributing to mixed interpretations of overall results." — 2026-07-17-podcast-biotech-hangout-episode-189-july-17-2026 (2026-07-17)
Sources
Related
- eli-lilly · oral-pcsk9-class-disruption · merck
- biogen-tau-failure-to-brain-shuttle-rerate · eplontersen-failure-to-alnylam-silencer-consolidation
- sam-facelli · matt-gline · yaron-werber — Biotech Hangout co-panelists