Billion Dollar Molecule: The Quest For The Perfect Drug

The Billion-Dollar Molecule raises the curtain on the fascinating and tumultuous drama of a radically new start-up pharmaceutical company. That company, Vertex, is trying to design a lifesaving new drug that - if it works - will prove the potential of a brand-new drug-making technique and also fulfill the vision of Vertex's founder and chairman, Joshua Boger, one of the most promising scientists of his generation. In early 1989 the thirty-seven-year-old Boger set out to revolutionize the drug industry, the most profitable industry in existence. Trained at Harvard and at Merck, the premier biomedical firm and perennially most admired corporation in America, Boger established Vertex to design drugs atom by atom. Barry Werth takes readers inside Vertex from its first days to profile the driven, obsessive scientists who work around the clock in pursuit of scientific breakthroughs. One member of Vertex's scientific advisory board, Stuart Schreiber, is a full professor at Harvard, younger even than Boger, and determined to win a Nobel Prize and to create new molecules that will elucidate the workings of the human cell. Schreiber, however, soon becomes Boger's chief rival in a competition between emerging scientific titans. The immediate goal for both Vertex and Schreiber is to explore the workings of a new immunosuppressant, a drug that prevents organ transplant rejections and that could have potentially wider uses. Only one approved immune-suppressing drug exists, and it has serious side effects. If Vertex can create a better drug, it will indeed be a billion-dollar molecule. But to succeed, Vertex needs money, lots of it. Every biotechnology story is also a Wall Street story, and Boger spends much of his time raising capital. With the assistance of the dean of venture capitalists, Benno Schmidt, Sr., Boger and his colleagues woo foreign companies eager to find American partners to help expand their presence in the U.S. pharmaceutical market. Eventually Boger decide

Editorial Reviews

Freelance writer Werth has taken two complex industries--biotechnology and high finance--and woven them into an intriguing story. The subject of his book is Vertex, a start-up firm headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., that set out to be among the first companies to successfully create and improve drugs through structure-based design, a goal that if attained could mean millions, if not billions, of dollars in revenues. Werth's wide access to Vertex and its executives is evident in his detailed account of what he describes as the ``blood sport'' of big-time science. Vertex is guided through the scientific and financial jungles by Joshua Boger, the founder of the company who is also very much the driving force of Werth's narrative. A compelling side-plot is Boger's relationship with Stuart Schreiber, a Harvard chemistry professor who turned from a colleague into a competitor. While the scientific jargon sometimes slows the pace of the work, most readers will stay the course to learn if Boger achieves his goals of raising funds (he does), discovering an important design-based drug and making a lot of money (coming close on both). (Feb.)