The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma Read Free Page A

marketing than on research, demanded that drugmakers change their ways, and suggested that he would propose price controls if they didn’t. As one analyst put it, Clinton had decided to “go to war” with the pharmaceutical companies—rich targets in the struggle against spiraling health costs. A few days later a congressional study criticized drugmakers’“excess profits.” In the two months since, all drug stocks, big and small, had lost one-third of their value.
    “I expect to see frogs raining down from the sky sometime soon,” Boger said. He was six foot five, rangy, all angles, with a broad forehead capped by thinning stick-straight brown hair. Tinted aviator glasses did nothing to dim an enveloping gaze and generally ecstatic grin. His cadences echoed a small-town North Carolina boyhood where from a young age he found himself explaining things to his unaccountably obtuse elders. Invited to discuss the industry perspective, Boger (pronounced with a hard g ) forecast a reckoning. Only the smartest, fleetest, most adaptable companies—companies such as Vertex that were burning tens, hundreds of millions of dollars chasing a broad portfolio of breakthrough drugs for serious diseases—would compete successfully in the new period, he said. Why? “Because we’re more motivated, and the fear of death and God is closer to us.” Chortling, Boger concluded with a bit of light heresy, a slide of a New Yorker cartoon showing an executive telling a lab-coated scientist sketching at a whiteboard, “I like it. Find a disease for it.”
    Strictly speaking, Vertex wasn’t a biotechnology company: it wasn’t trying to engineer new products by manipulating genes, so-called biologics. It aspired to make small-molecule drugs—“little pills in bottles with cotton on top,” as Boger put it—the time-honored staple of traditional pharmaceutical discovery and development. But with the prospect of launching its own products still many years off, and by no means certain, and with it burning prodigiously through capital, Vertex was a biotech by default. Boger often joked that he didn’t know it was a biotech company until Kidder Peabody, the investment bank that took it public, told him it was.
    Despite the dire mood, he had earned his cheerful attitude, mostly through backbreaking pursuit, although luck and charisma helped. He had proved he could sell Vertex’s story no matter how distressed the market was. Two weeks earlier, Vertex had announced a $20 million deal with Kissei Pharmaceutical Co., the fastest-growing Japanese drug company, to develop AIDS medicines in the Far East. Entrepreneurs forever hustle for capital, but Kissei, an improbable suitor, had initiated the contact months earlier, coming to Boger as if off a cloud. He and Richard Aldrich, Vertex’s chief business officer, had been shopping other projects on oneof their twice-yearly “death marches” through dozens of executive suites in east Asia in late January. The Japanese had yet even to acknowledge that AIDS existed in their country, so severe was the stigma. Yet Vertex’s business liaison urged them to visit Kissei in Matsumoto City, on a misty high-mountain plateau six hours from Tokyo. “Long ride. Switching trains,” Aldrich recalls. “We didn’t know them. We were resistant. But he said, ‘No, they really want to meet you, this could be worthwhile.’ I remember we were in the car driving between labs. One of the Kissei guys turned around—Josh and I were in the backseat—and he says to Josh, ‘Dr. Boger, at Kissei you are a god.’ And, of course, Josh immediately liked Kissei. Within forty-five minutes of arriving there, we went into a side room with the senior guys and started talking money on the deal.”
    Such good fortune and adulation might have gone to Boger’s head if not for the unending pressure, in the face of minimal resources, to get as many projects off the ground and find partners for them as soon as possible—an