North Carolina-based CRO Fortrea is saying goodbye to its CEO. Thomas Pike is hitting the road effective May 13 and will be replaced in the interim by Peter Neupert, Fortrea’s lead independent director.
A search for Pike’s permanent successor is already in the advanced stages, Fortrea said in a May 12 release. Pike will stay at the company as a consultant to help with the leadership transition.
Fortrea was spun out of Labcorp in July 2023 with Pike at the helm. The company is headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, but has locations on every continent except Antarctica. Less than a year after spinning out, Fortrea offloaded its Endpoint Clinical and Fortrea Patient Access businesses to a private equity firm for $345 million.
“Tom has led the company through a challenging period, navigating a complex operating environment while laying critical groundwork for long-term improvement,” Neupert said in the release. “With Fortrea now operating as a fully independent company as it approaches two years since its spin, Tom and the Board agreed that this is the right time to move ahead with this planned transition.”
The global CRO held its first-quarter earnings call on the same day it announced Pike’s departure, reporting that the company’s revenue dipped by 1.6% year over year. Fortrea’s stock price has been in free fall over the past year—from around $37 per share in May 2024 to around $5 as of 3 p.m. ET on Monday.
The CRO has also attracted significant scrutiny in its short history. Acelyrin blamed Fortea for the apparent failure of the biotech’s lead asset izokibep in a phase 3 trial for moderate to severe hidradenitis suppurativa in September 2023, after a dosing error in a separate izokibep trial led Acelyrin to question the entire program.
Fortrea disagreed with certain parts of Acelyrin’s claims at the time but said it would investigate the third-party vendor responsible for the error.