When Kåre Schultz was appointed CEO of Teva in 2017, Prof. Michael Hayden, who was then heading the company’s innovative R&D unit, was instructed not to recruit any additional staff for at least a year. Teva was, at that point, still reeling from its acquisition of Actavis, which had saddled it with heavy debt and forced it to refocus on its core business. Hayden realized that either his days at the company were numbered, or that his role as chief innovation officer would be sharply curtailed.
In an interview with "Globes," Hayden says that he approached Schultz and asked to leave Teva, but to take two projects with him. Last September, one of them became the largest exit to date by an Israeli?originated drug?development company: 89Bio, which develops innovative therapies to treat patients with liver and cardiometabolic diseases, was acquired by Roche for $2.4 billion, with the potential to reach $3.5 billion on the basis of future milestones. The other is Prilenia Therapeutics, still privately held, which is developing drugs for neurodegenerative brain diseases.
Why did Teva give up these products?
"Schultz was very generous. He told me to take some of the people I wanted, because he knew he would probably have to lay some of them off anyway, and this way they would have a good home. He signed an agreement with me, with good terms, deferred milestones, and royalties, and even let me take inventory of products that were already manufactured. I think Teva took this step as part of its commitment to Israel, at a time when it could not express it through direct investment."
A company named after a street
The person who originally brought Hayden to Teva was Jeremy Levin, who served as CEO from 2012 to 2013. The local biomed industry was initially skeptical about the Levin-Hayden team, which focused Teva on very specific innovation areas and ended agreements with several Israeli companies in which Teva had invested in the past. Ultimately, alongside building 89Bio, Hayden also brought to Teva some of the innovative products on which it has since built its impressive comeback.
89Bio, founded by Hayden and another former Teva empoyee, Ram Waisbourd, got its name from the street where the OrbiMed fund was located. "At the time, it was at 89 Medinat Hayehudim Street, and the investing partner Anat Naschitz, said, ‘This name proves we’ll be strategic investors in the company.’ In the end, they didn’t stay for long with the company- nor at that address," Hayden laughs.
The company, which developed an antibody for the treatment of fatty liver disease, blood lipid disorders, diabetes, and obesity, was listed on Nasdaq in 2019 at a $193 million valuation. It came to the stock exchange shortly before the boom in biomed stocks during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic and zero interest rates, and 89Bio too benefited from the rise in share prices.
But within two years of its peak, by 2022, the stock had lost 94% of its value, and there was a real risk that the company would not survive if investors fled and it failed to raise enough capital to complete its trials. Many good companies have ended this way.
Hayden explains that beyond the market shift caused by the end of the pandemic and rising interest rates, 89Bio also faced additional challenges at that time. Other companies began developing drugs based on the same mechanism. And if there is anything worse than competitors who succeed with the same mechanism, it is competitors who fail with it - as happened with Novo Nordisk and BMS. What is more, the FDA tightened regulatory requirements for fatty liver trials, while at the same time GLP?based anti?obesity drugs entered the market. The company therefore had to prove that its drug improved liver fibrosis, not only blood lipid profiles, in order to differentiate itself.
"The return for Roche will be in 2030"
Fortunately, the company had raised very large amounts of money and entered this difficult period with sufficient cash reserves. Gradually, investor enthusiasm came back around to fatty liver and the company’s proprietary antibody, and the stock rebounded strongly. Even so, at the time of the exit it had still not returned to its 2020 peak and was traded at about 50% below its IPO price. The reason, in part, was the dilution of investors in huge offerings by the company, which raised over $1 billion during its days on the stock exchange.
Most of the original Israeli investors - mainly OrbiMed and Pontifax Venture Capital - exited around the IPO, and as far as they were concerned, did so wisely. Over time, the company also reduced its activities in Israel and distanced itself from an "Israeli" identity.
The product, now in advanced trials, still has to complete them in order to reach the market, and it is not absolutely certain that it will succeed in doing so. It also faces competition from two other products in the same category. Hayden believes the development risk is low, but says: "The real return to Roche from this product will not come before 2030." This is likely one reason for the timing of the exit. "Roche knows how to deal with complex manufacturing processes," he explains. According to company reports just before the sale, Hayden’s shares and options are expected to yield him about $5 million immediately following the exit, with several million more if the deal reaches its full value.
The second company Hayden took with him, Prilenia Therapeuics, still operates in Israel.
How did the company start?
"I brought the molecule pridopidine into Teva from a Danish company, NeuroSearch. We discovered that it protects nerve cells from degeneration, for example in Huntington’s disease. I’ve been working on this disease for 40 years, and I’ve never seen results like this with a safety profile like this."
The name Prilenia has great meaning for Hayden. "It is a combination of the drug name, pridopidine, and Lenya, after Lenos, the Celtic god of healing."
Who were the investors?
"It wasn’t easy to raise money at first, until we met a private investor whose son had a rare brain disease, Vanishing White Matter. He invested even though it wasn’t the main disease we were targeting. Today his son and another child are being treated, and there has been no deterioration - a surprising and very happy finding." Over the years, the company has raised more than $140 million from leading US venture capital funds, including Forbion.
An early Huntington’s trial was unsuccessful, but luckily the company was accepted into an ALS trial run by Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. "To our surprise and delight, we saw that the drug had a clear effect, especially in fast?progressing patients. The NIH then approved treatment for 200 ALS patients who are too seriously ill for other clinical trials - meaning that we are their last chance. We recruited all the patients in just eight months instead of the usual one to two years. The trial will begin soon and the follow-up will take two years."
At the same time, the company is continuing its work on Huntington’s disease. "We believe the earlier failure was due to interactions with other medications. Patients who weren’t taking other drugs did respond. We thought that maybe the reprocessed results would be enough for us to obtain approval, but we were asked to run a new trial."
Your former boss, the one who took you from academia to Teva and started this whole entrepreneurial path with you, is former Teva CEO Jeremy Levin, who runs a company that treats a variety of neurological conditions. Are you in competition?
"It's a completely different product, and the neurological world, like the oncology world, will need much more than one product for every disease. I will always support Jeremy."
"The golden age of biomed"
Aside from your specific successes, how do you assess the state of the biomed market today?
"We are in the golden age of biomed - thanks to ongoing work in genomics, gene editing, AI?driven protein behavior modelling, and stem?cell breakthroughs. AI currently understands only about 10% of biological mechanisms, so there is still a long way to go, but it is already aiding drug development."
"I learned from former minister Litzman to ask who’s the boss"
Hayden recently visited Israel for a conference organized by AION Labs and the National Pharma-Tech Founders Forum, moderated by AION CEO Mati Gil. In conversation with Ram Weisbourd, his former partner at 89bio, Hayden recounted, among other things, his experiences from his time at Teva.
"I met with then-Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, who asked me, 'Why isn't Teva investing in Israel more?’ I mentioned the improvements I wanted to see in the regulatory track for clinical trials, and he forwarded the request to the ministry’s director-general Moshe Bar Siman Tov, who told him that it was impossible to instantly reverse a regulation. And Litzman said, 'But who's the boss here?' and I learned something: Ask this question of the companies I manage, and especially ask myself. I remind myself that I'm the boss, and I also know that anyone who wants others to behave as though they own the company has to make them feel that way, at all levels."
Asked about Israel’s strengths, Hayden cites genius, enthusiasm, and academic excellence, but also mentions weaknesses: over-optimism, and a small market that makes it necessary to go global quickly. "You have to maintain good relations with the world, which has become more difficult in recent years, because not everyone understands that you can love your country all the time, but support its government only when it deserves it," he says. "That's exactly how I felt about South Africa, where I grew up, and today it’s one of the leaders of the anti-Israel movement.
"It will be difficult for some Israeli companies in the near term, but keep on doing what you do. In the end, genius will win."
Hayden's other occupation: Locating artworks that his family lost during the Holocaust
Alongside his passion for drug development, Hayden has been busy in recent years restoring and researching artworks and documents that belonged to his family before the Holocaust.
Hayden's grandparents were born in Göttingen, Germany. The family was very wealthy and owned one of the largest Judaica collections in the world. On Kristallnacht, SS soldiers came to the house, marched the family naked outside, and eventually arrested several family members, including Hayden's grandfather, Max Rudolf Hahn. "They locked him up in front of the synagogue so he could see it burn," Hayden recalls. Hahn was in prison for nine months, during which time the government seized his property. Hahn tried to get some of his money into the United States, and even bought two buildings there, but these were nationalized during the war by the US government because they were owned by a German. "To this day, we haven't been able to get them back," Hayden says.
A still-open Pandora’s box
Hayden's father, Rudolf Hahn, fled to England and changed his name to Roger Hayden, so that he could assimilate more easily. From there he emigrated to South Africa. Most of the family perished in the Holocaust, and most of their belongings were lost. Some boxes, however, mostly of documents, were sent by the family ahead of time to Switzerland and Sweden. When Hayden's father died in 1984, the boxes were sent to him. Only 20 years later did he open them, and since then, that Pandora's box has not closed.
"I always lived with the number six million, and suddenly there were two people in front of me - my grandfather and grandmother. I read the letters they sent to my father from prison, and the letters my grandfather sent to his lawyers, trying to get his belongings back. That's how I knew where some of them had disappeared. These letters documented the life of the Jews in Germany before the war. You can see how involved they are in the local industry. How much they feel part of Germany and don't believe that what finally happened could ever happen.
"Today, I understand a lot more about anti-Semitism, which seems to be coming back. We can’t be too naïve about the countries we live in, and we have to understand that one thing leads to another."
A prayer book from 1714
On the basis of the documents, Hayden identified some historical artifacts from Max Rudolf Hahn’s collection. For example, he discovered that some of had been sold to the Göttingen City Museum. When he asked the museum for the artifacts, at first he was told that they did not know where they were, then that they were sold to the museum at a fair price, but in the end the museum decided to return them -moreover, in an official ceremony acknowledging the injustice done to the family. The event included a tour of sites in the city related to the Hahn family, and Hahn objects were displayed in an exhibition where Hayden could see his grandfather's living room furniture together with a 19th-century comb, and a prayer book from 1714.
These days, Hayden is preoccupied more with documents than with artifacts. "We documented everything digitally and I'm writing a book - more than one - based on these findings. The University of Göttingen, which before the war had won 27 Nobel Prizes, 23 of them to Jewish researchers, even awarded me an honorary degree for this research. Upon receiving the prize, I gave a lecture entirely on the subject of how to resist oppressive regimes."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 12, 2026.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2026.