The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma

378 Pages·2014·3.78 MB·English

by  Barry Werth

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CONTENTS
Cast of Characters
Introduction
PART 1: Feeding the Beast
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PART 2: Game Worth the Candle
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART 3: Showtime
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Afterword
Appendix 1: List of Molecules
Appendix 2: Abbreviations and Acronyms
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Index
For my remarkable mother, Hilda Werth
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Job titles indicate significant posts at Vertex unless otherwise specified. Years represent
total time with the company.
John Alam: former executive vice president for medicines development and chief
medical officer (1997–2006).
Richard Aldrich: former senior vice president and chief business officer (1989–2000).
Bob Beall: CEO and chairman of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Joshua Boger: founder and former CEO and chairman; director (1989–).
Ken Boger: former general counsel (2001–2011); brother of the founder.
John Condon: senior vice president of pharmaceutical operations and manufacturing
(2005–).
Bo Cumbo: former vice president of sales; leader of Incivek commercial team (2010–
2012).
Matthew Emmens: former CEO, president, and chairman (2005–2012).
Russ Fleischer: senior clinical analyst at the Food and Drug Administration, division
of antiviral products; chief examiner for Incivek.
Bink Garrison: former senior vice president and “catalyst”; drove Vertex’s values and
vision process (2004–2009).
Trish Hurter: senior vice president for pharmaceutical development (2004–).
Keith Johnson: cystic fibrosis patient; clinical study participant for Kalydeco.
Robert Kauffman: chief medical officer and senior vice president (1997–).
Adam Koppel: managing director at Brookside Capital; major Vertex investor.
Ann Kwong: former vice president, hepatitis C franchise (1997–2012).
Jeffrey Leiden: chairman, president, and current CEO (2012–).
John McHutchison: outside clinical investigator for Incivek; later, senior vice
president for liver disease therapeutics at Gilead.
Peter Mueller: chief scientific officer and executive vice president for global R&D
(2002–).
Mark Murcko: former chief technology officer and former chair of the scientific
advisory board (1990–2011).
Paul Negulescu: vice president of research; San Diego site head (2001–).
Eric Olson: former vice president and cystic fibrosis program leader (2001–2013).
Michael Partridge: vice president of investor relations (1997–).
Geoffrey Porges: senior analyst for global biotechnology at AllianceBernstein.
Amit Sachdev: senior vice president for global government strategy, market access,
and value (2007–).
Charles Sanders: former chairman (1996–2010).
Vicki Sato: former president (1992–2005).
Ian Smith: executive vice president and chief financial officer (2001–).
John Thomson: vice president of strategic R&D networks (1989–).
Roger Tung: former vice president of drug discovery (1989–2004).
Fred Van Goor: head of cystic fibrosis biology, cystic fibrosis research program
(2001–).
Jack Weet: former vice president of regulatory affairs (2009–2011).
Nancy Wysenski: former chief commercial officer (2009–2012).
Joshua Boger
Courtesy of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, circa 1994
INTRODUCTION
Why I Went Back Inside Vertex
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about a bold and bruising quest. It told the story of a
group of entrepreneurial young scientists who left the world’s best drug company—the
most admired business in America year after year—because they were confident they
would be more productive on their own, starting from scratch. They aimed to design
better drugs, atom by atom. Most people across the industry thought their project in a
refitted construction company garage in Cambridge, Massachusetts—to build an
organization that could produce dramatically improved medicines to transform the
lives of people with serious diseases—was a pipe dream, a money pit, a consuming act
of arrogance, an exhausting feat of hubris, a fool’s errand.
“Don’t you think this is five years too early?” founding scientist and president
Joshua Boger was often asked. “Yes,” he would say, “but five years from now it’ll be five
years too late.”
I found their passionate belief in science and in themselves, brimming with high
purpose and combative glee, stirring and infectious as I followed them around for a
couple of years while they tried to get their cash-starved company, Vertex
Pharmaceuticals, off the ground. It was a rocky, exhilarating, eye-opening ride. The
chase for new leads was fierce, not just against “Mother Merck” but also top academic
labs, including those led by some of their own scientific advisors, who they feared were
sharing Vertex’s most prized insights with its rivals. When Boger settled for a tie in a
race to publication against one of them, a Harvard professor, he told me: “I’ll take it.
But I want to rub his nose in the dirt and step on his head.”
Such was the knife-edge between cooperation and competition in the new
biopharmaceutical order. Whatever unease I felt at witnessing up close how ferocious
capitalism and scientific rivalries—rather than, say, altruism—drove the search for new
lifesaving drugs receded in the wake of Vertex’s precocious early success. Boger
assembled a team of talented, rampantly motivated biologists, chemists, biophysicists,
and computer scientists while he and his chief lieutenant tap-danced their way around