As the new executive VP and chief development officer of BrainStorm, Dagher is tasked with securing FDA approval of NurOwn for the treatment of ALS.
Pictured: Bob Dagher, BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics
Growing up in Lebanon, Bob Dagher was the captain of his childhood soccer team. Those everyday games, he said, set the stage for how he now views his work as the executive vice president and chief development officer for BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics.
“It wasn’t the competition that drove me, but to play with others, the bonding, the connection,” Dagher told BioSpace. “I enjoyed the game, passing the ball, [and] playing fair. That stayed with me.”
BrainStorm, a biotech focused on the development of treatments for rare neurological diseases, welcomed Dagher onto the team in July 2023 to help guide the organization’s portfolio strategy and clinical development plans for products in the works. The move comes on the heels of positive Phase III results for its amyotrophic lateral sclerosis candidate, NurOwn, and its highly anticipated approval decision by the FDA in December 2023.
As a new leader nearing the home stretch of the long drug development process, Dagher recalls those childhood games of football that inform his management style.
“It’s the human piece that comes first,” he explained. “Each member can be so strong, but if they can’t gel and read each other’s minds . . . it will be disjointed.”
Global Medical Training
Beyond the soccer field, Dagher was a bright student who knew early that he wanted to pursue a career in medicine, but he didn’t have family members or people in his community that were in the healthcare industry. Plus, this was wartime in Lebanon, and one of the only options for driven young people to go to college was to leave the nation, migrate to France and continue their education there. So that’s what Dagher did.
Throughout his studies at Bordeaux University in the early 1990s, he focused on psychiatry and neurology. After graduation, he tossed around the idea of becoming a surgeon. But before he could move forward with that, he emigrated to Quebec, where members of his family had relocated.
“I wanted to do orthopedics and fix bones, but as soon as I transferred out of Bordeaux, I found the path in North America difficult for that,” he said.
After a short stint in Canada, Dagher was matched with a residency at Boston University Medical Center in 1996. He has lived in the city ever since.
All of these intercontinental shifts in his pursuit of a career in medicine prepared him for his current role in clinical research, Dagher said. Each transition required step-by-step, regimented actions to move forward, just like clinical trials do. It also helped him to be comfortable with a level of uncertainty and forced him to trust a larger process, he added.
With time, Dagher completed his residency in Boston and co-founded a private practice. He also became a speaker and a medical expert for legal trials, and headed study trials for a handful of Boston-area biotechs like Covance and Cadent Therapeutics. One by one, those experiences led him to BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics.
Eyes on the Prize—and Beyond
As a leader, Dagher said he urges his research teams to trust their guts, but take the first, second, and third step even when they’re unsure if those actions will eventually pay off.
“Sometimes I just put my bathing suit on and dive in the pool. I know how to swim, so let’s see what the current brings,” Dagher said. “If you take the other route of extra care and carefulness, then the learning will be less. There’s a trade-off.”
This is especially important in a field where studying the brain is never a straightforward process. It’s constantly riddled with hypotheses, failures and discoveries. In a previous project with Genzyme/Sanofi, Dagher completed a study that included 12 amendments to the original protocol as the research wore on and new findings forced the team to adjust the entire plan.
“The brain is like the last frontier that we’re not able to conquer easily,” Dagher said. “We always make assumptions about the brain anatomically, but the networking, the interconnectedness . . .we are scratching the surface.”
The endless mystery of the brain is evident in NurOwn’s journey to regulatory approval. The Brainstorm team initially presented their findings to the FDA in 2021, but received notification that their Phase III trials were not strong enough to grant a BLA. In November 2022, approval was rejected again for manufacturing and clinical pain-points. Dagher said he hopes his ingrained sense of perseverance and flexibility will
While FDA approval is often seen as the end goal of biopharma companies when developing new therapies, Dagher’s drive goes one step further—actually delivering the treatment to the patients that need it. His extensive geographic journey gives him a perspective that many leaders in the biopharma field don’t, he said.
When he was a child, Lebanon had a highly privatized healthcare market with few quality public options. Canada and France had public healthcare systems that provide universal healthcare access but created bottlenecks for patients, providers, and researchers alike. When he arrived in the United States, he said that he believed, as many practitioners did, that the healthcare system would benefit every citizen. Unfortunately, he continued, that has not been his experience.
“We’re still trying to solve the healthcare issues in this country. It’s so expensive. Many don’t have health insurance,” he said. “[At Brainstorm], we bring new discoveries, we cultivate them, we go in front of the FDA, go global, and offer it to the world.”
Karen Fischer is a freelance science writer based in New Mexico. Reach her at kfischerwrites.com.
