Expanding the Endpoints newsroom overseas, a special projects hire and our new lead for events

It’s been an amazing first half of the year here at Endpoints News. Our company is 50% bigger than it was at the start of 2023, with growth in our news team, our business side and our support group — all built around our mission of being the most vital source of journalism about the biopharma industry.

In the last few months, we’ve brought our readers scoops on the exit of Illumina’s CEO and a controversial board pick at Biogen, a look ahead at the demand for IPOs and M&A later this year, analysis of the FDA’s use of adcomms, and smart coverage, every day, about the most important news in biopharma.

Today we’re announcing a further expansion of our newsroom, as well as an exciting leader for our events group as we enhance our in-person and virtual offerings.

Growing our breaking news group across the globe

Reynald Castañeda

A pillar of our expansion here at Endpoints has been to not only bring you exclusive news you can’t get anywhere else but also make sure you never miss important stories on trial readouts, financings, M&A, people changes and more. Our Early Edition is in your inbox each US morning and relies on a dedicated team of early-rising journalists to produce it.

To strengthen that coverage, we’re adding three new journalists who will be based in the UK. They’ll be led by Reynald Castañeda in London, who will work closely with Amber Tong in Hong Kong to oversee our morning and overnight news. In the coming weeks, Reynald and Amber will be joined by Ayisha Sharma and Anna Brown as breaking news reporters in London, who will help start our day earlier and bring their expertise to you.

Ayisha Sharma

Reynald has a decade of experience as a healthcare journalist, most recently as Reuters Insight’s head of pharma research. Prior to that, he was an editor for Clinical Trials Arena and wrote long-form features and scoops as an investigative journalist for GlobalData Insights.

Ayisha comes to us from Scrip and is based in London. She’s spent the last two years covering the commercial implications of clinical trials, deals and drug approvals and will report on developing business and science news out of Europe and early in the US day.

Anna Brown

Anna joins us from Informa Connect, where she was a senior digital producer developing and moderating events for BioProcess International. The production of complex new therapies is one of the most important stories in biotech, and in addition to breaking news, she will help grow our coverage of the manufacturing side of the industry. She has a master’s degree in biomedical sciences from the University of Bristol and is also based in London.

Expanding our coverage

As Endpoints has grown, we’ve also begun to think about parts of healthcare that look similar to biotech. We’re interested in innovation and change, how it gets funded and incentivized, who regulates and gate-keeps it, and how it affects the lives of customers and patients.

Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer

To lead that expansion, we’ve hired Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer, and she’ll focus on growing our coverage in the world of health tech. In the same way that the world of pharmaceuticals is always being changed by biological innovation, we plan to launch new coverage of how the broader world of healthcare is being changed by tech and business innovation.

Lydia comes to us from Insider, where she helped build the publication’s healthcare coverage, breaking news on drug-pricing debates, chronicling the fall of Theranos and covering biopharma. She then helped launch their health tech coverage, focusing on how companies ranging from startups to the biggest tech companies in the world were trying to make their mark in healthcare.

Lia DeGroot

Lydia joins us in August, working from Denver, and will start to build out this exciting new area of coverage for us.

As part of our expansion, we’ve also invested more in our Washington team, which has long been led by Zach Brennan. Earlier this month, we hired Lia DeGroot to add to our coverage of the FDA and health policy and legislation on Capitol Hill. Lia joins Endpoints from Inside Health Policy, where she covered the FDA, and will work closely with Zach and the rest of our biopharma team.

Evolving our editorial and sponsor events

As Endpoints News has grown, so have the ways in which we connect with readers outside our stories. We now have a thriving events business, with major gatherings in Boston, San Francisco and London, as well as our robust online events business. We often talk here about the global community in biopharma and the power of our publication to connect our readers with each other through in-depth, sophisticated conversation and networking opportunities.

Carrie Cliggett

This month, Carrie Cliggett joined us as our new VP of events to lead the growth of this part of our content and our business into the next phase of its growth. Carrie joins us from Wolters Kluwer, where she was VP, global event management, after a career that has spanned Bloomberg, New York Institute of Technology and Fortune.

Over the next several years, you can expect to see more stand-alone events from us, more high-profile interviews with newsmakers, more opportunities for connection and networking with peers in the industry, and a continuation of the expertly produced, deeply intelligent content and conversation that our readers and business partners have long trusted us to create.

Carrie will work with Ryan McRae, our chief revenue officer, as well as the stellar Endpoints events and partnership teams that many of you already know.

This is an exciting time at Endpoints, and our partners at the Financial Times have helped make possible many of these new hires, as well as our hires from earlier in the year who are already thriving inside the (virtual) newsroom.

In addition to adding great people, we’re also continuously thinking about how we serve our readers better, getting you the information you need when you need it. You can expect more improvements to our site and our newsletter in the months to come.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for more breaking news, more great reporting and analysis, and more chances to convene and hear from the biggest names in the industry. We’re glad to have you as our readers!

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