Biogen CEO Chris Viehbacher joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the company's 2026 outlook, drug pipeline, the focus on rare diseases, state of the biotech sector, and more.
Questions asked in this interview
4
0:00First of all, what are you going to tell people?
1:07Why are you focusing on rare and what do you see with the next year and beyond?
6:23So what do you get in terms of what investors are looking for right now, and what would you seek from the government in terms of assistance for helping get some of these therapies out?
Joining us right now from the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco is Chris Viehbacher. He is the CEO of Biogen. And Chris, thank you. It's great to talk to you this morning. I'm hoping you could lay out a little bit about not only what you're going to talk about today at the JP Morgan conference, but also what you're hearing, what's different this year, what strikes you. Go ahead. First of all, what are you going to tell people?
Well, thanks Becky for having me here. This is an important year for Biogen. We have been building a new future of sustainable growth through our pipeline that contains five potentially transformative new medicines, three of which are in rare diseases, in 10 late-stage registrational clinical trials. 2026 is the year where we start to turn over the cards of those, and we will see every year now new clinical studies coming along that hopefully will lead us to registration of new medicines. And that comes on the back of having launched four first-in-class and first-in-disease medicines. So I think it's an exciting period for Biogen.
The emphasis that you have on rare disease is really interesting to me. We last week launched this Cures Initiative here at CNBC where we're going to be focusing on that because far too often these rare diseases or orphan diseases kind of get overlooked. It's not seen as a marketable opportunity, but you really are not only doubling, but maybe tripling down on this space. I know back in August, you brought together a lot of people within the community and some researchers along the way to try and figure out how you could do more with rare. Why are you focusing on rare and what do you see with the next year and beyond?
First, let me thank you, Becky, for really raising awareness of rare diseases. As you know, there are about 10,000 rare diseases and approximately 10% of the population suffers from a rare disease. So although each individual disease has a few number of patients, this is actually a major healthcare issue. One of the major issues of rare diseases is actually getting to a diagnosis, because these diseases are so poorly known it can take years before people find a diagnosis. And yes, it is true that the number of patients is individually small, but I think one of the things that rare diseases does differently is that we really are able to globalize these products. So we couldn't necessarily, like in a lot of other diseases, justify the investment on the population in the United States, but we are able to take these medicines and go around the world. Our product for instance for spinal muscular atrophy, Spinraza, has about 15,000 patients on it worldwide, but 9,000 of those are outside the US. So if you are able to go and globalize, obviously it takes a long time to actually find the patients, there's an awful lot of education of physicians, development of biomarkers to assist in diagnosing these diseases. But it is also an area of huge unmet need. Biogen has a history of breakthrough medicines trying to solve healthcare's hardest problems, and so this is really the ethos of who Biogen is.
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Viehbacher, C. (2026, January 13). Biogen CEO Chris Viehbacher on 2026 drug pipeline outlook, rare disease strategy [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/637982/
MLA
Christopher Viehbacher. "Biogen CEO Chris Viehbacher on 2026 drug pipeline outlook, rare disease strategy." CNBC Television, 13 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/637982/.
BibTeX
@misc{viehbacher2026_637982,
author = {Christopher Viehbacher},
title = {Biogen CEO Chris Viehbacher on 2026 drug pipeline outlook, rare disease strategy},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/637982/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
