Annemarie Hanekamp has overseen some of the most transformative changes in oncology over her years in Big Pharma. Now, she will oversee BioNTech’s transition from a COVID-19 vaccine maker to an “end-to-end organizational oncology powerhouse.”
If you look at Annemarie Hanekamp’s resume, she’s the person pharma calls when they need to make a huge commercial shift—and fast. Luckily, her new employer BioNTech knows a thing or two about that.
Hanekamp took the reins as Chief Commercial Officer in July 2024 to oversee BioNTech’s transition from a COVID-19 vaccine maker back to its original roots as an oncology company. She arrives as BioNTech prepares to launch its first oncology asset in 2026. The company has a lofty goal of commercializing therapeutics in 10 indications by 2030.
The stakes are high for Hanekamp and her new team. Over at peer company Moderna, President Stephen Hoge, who leads all R&D for the company, admitted in September 2024 that the famed biotech had taken on too much. Hoge and crew set out to cut $4 billion in R&D expenses by 2028 and slowed down the drug discovery engine to clear the way to execute a planned three launches a year for three years in a row.
“I think we are not naive in how much it takes to commercialize assets,” Hanekamp told BioSpace in an interview on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
She would not comment specifically on Moderna’s actions, but said the industry has learned that developing drugs sequentially no longer works. Now, BioNTech and others are shifting to developing the pipeline in parallel. The approach carries an elevated risk, but that’s a good way to figure out the winners early on, Hanekamp said.
“We’re a company that’s willing to take a risk and fail fast, fail quick, to then learn and move on. I think that sets us up uniquely for success.”
Speed is everything, and Hanekamp said that she and CEO Ugur Sahin know it’s not just about a return for shareholders. Patients need new options as fast as possible.
“In terms of how we bring these therapeutics to patients, there are different avenues. . . . Not biting off more than we can chew, I think is a very important theme,” Hanekamp said. “Because nothing would hurt me, personally, more—and I know Ugur as well—if we have an innovative therapy that can add benefit to patients’ lives, and we cannot get it to the patients.”
That means being open to partnerships where it makes sense, while developing into a fully commercial biotech company. BioNTech partnered with Pfizer to produce the COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic, a relationship that is ongoing. Hanekamp wouldn’t rule out any kind of partnership but said it will depend on the asset and whether it can be successful with BioNTech alone or with another company involved. Hanekamp said her JPM schedule is chock full of meetings with potential partners.
“There’s no company—including Big Pharma, which I came from—that has unlimited resources and can do it all,” Hanekamp said.
This time around, BioNTech is signing many deals as the lead or bigger partner, such as the DualityBio partnership signed in April 2023 to develop new antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). The sidestep to COVID loaded BioNTech up with cash to use for this transition back to oncology. The biotech has a robust pipeline and has been trimming around the edges to ensure the strongest programs survive.
“We want to be a commercial end-to-end organizational oncology powerhouse,” Hanekamp said. “Yes, our goal is to establish a commercial footprint. But how do we go best? How do we ensure that the assets we’re developing actually get into patients? Otherwise it doesn’t really matter what we do.”
From Scratch
Prior to joining BioNTech last year, Hanekamp was head of the radioligand therapy program at Novartis where she helped navigate the early launch challenges of prostate cancer therapy Pluvicto, which was met with unprecedented demand. She also previously oversaw Bristol Myers Squibb’s immunotherapy strategy in the heyday of the Opdivo-versus-Keytruda era.
“I was there for the first wave of the immuno-oncology,” Hanekamp said. “Not everybody believed in it, to say the least, and it was really hard to get there. I had to build a team. I had to build the organization that started to convince the external world.” The challenge was that, unlike traditional cancer therapies at the time, the tumors did not just melt away. Immunotherapies took time.
While the scenario at BioNTech is different, Hanekamp is in familiar territory overseeing a dramatic transformation. She said the key to building a commercial team is to understand that the ultimate goal of selling a drug must involve all teams at all stages, from manufacturing to legal to R&D to IT and more.
“I worked mostly at Big Pharma, where they had established commercial organizations, but I had to deal with a lot of mindset changes after reorganizations, after building up, introducing new eras, like the immunomodulators, that I feel like this just comes together,” Hanekamp said. “I can do that now at scale for a company that has such an exciting pipeline that not everybody saw in this industry.”
That does not mean coming in and telling everyone how it’s going to be. Hanekamp began her new role with an ear keen to listen and understand how BioNTech’s extraordinary experience with COVID-19 could be applied to the company’s next generation. Hanekamp is focusing on building a lean, AI-informed commercial team that is anchored in the data coming from BioNTech’s clinical studies.
“The benefit we have,” Hanekamp said, “is that we are not set back by [an] established commercial footprint. So we can really build this from scratch.”
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