Hans Bishop
Juno Therapeutics CEO Hans Bishop speaking at the 2016 GeekWire Summit. (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong)

This time last year, Seattle biotech company Juno Therapeutics was on its way to having the first CAR T immunotherapy treatment on the market.

But a clinical trial of its lead treatment candidate was suspended twice following the deaths of five patients. In March, the company dropped the treatment, putting it out of the race to be first on the scene.

Now Juno’s top executives have taken dings to their compensation, largely in the form of stock options, according to the company’s annual proxy statement filed with the SEC.

Juno CEO Hans Bishop got the most compensation among the company’s lead execs, making a total of $3.7 million in 2016. That’s down from $5.2 million in 2015.

Almost all of that difference comes from stock options: he made just over $3 million there in 2016 compared to just under $4.5 million the year before. All the executives named in the filing made less in 2016 than they did the year before, and in every case, the dollar amount of stock options and awards saw a sharp decrease.

For two executives, this may be because they received a staggering amount of stock income when they joined the company in 2015: VP of research and chief science officer Hyam Levitsky alone made over $13 million in stock awards and options at that point.

Juno’s stock has suffered since the clinical trial was pulled, although the company has several other promising candidates in earlier stages of development.

The filing didn’t give details on how executives’ stock compensation was decided, saying only that it is based on financial analysis and comparison to the market.

Another interesting note from the filing: the executives’ received 80 percent of their possible performance bonuses, only losing out because of the failed trial.

Compensation from that bonus amounts to a drop in the bucket when compared to stock options: only $200,000 for Bishop, or five percent of his compensation.

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