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The Billion Dollar Molecule: One Company's Quest for the Perfect Drug


by Barry Werth

List Price: $14.00
Available: Usually ships in 24 hours
Sales Rank: 116214
Studio: Simon & Schuster
Binding: Paperback
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: March 01, 1995
Publisher: Simon & Schuster


EDITORIAL REVIEWS

Product Description
Join journalist Barry Werth as he pulls back the curtain on Vertex, a start-up pharmaceutical company, and witness firsthand the intense drama being played out in the pioneering and hugely profitable field of drug research. Founded by Joshua Boger, a dynamic Harvard- and Merck-trained scientific whiz kid, Vertex is dedicated to designing -- atom by atom -- both a new life-saving immunosuppressant drug, and a drug to combat the virus that causes AIDS.

You will be hooked from start to finish, as you go from the labs, where obsessive, fiercely competitive scientists struggle for a breakthrough, to Wall Street, where the wheeling and dealing takes on a life of its own, as Boger courts investors and finally decides to take Vertex public. Here is a fascinating no-holds-barred account of the business of science, which includes an updated epilogue about the most recent developments in the quest for a drug to cure AIDS.


Amazon.com
From test tubes to the Wall Street IPO and beyond, this is the riveting true story of a start-up pharmaceutical company working to create an anti-AIDS drug. Scientifically accurate, yet written with an attention to plot, timing, dialogue, and development of character more characteristic of the best thrillers.


CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 22 reviews)

Great Story and Case Study  
"The Billion Dollar Molecule" is a great story on its own merits. The facts that the book (a) is based on real life, (b) offers important lessons about business and entrepreneurship and (c) provides a good overview of the pharmaceutical field are just additional incentives to read this excellent publication.

Filled with clear and well-drawn characters, spanning landscapes from the research laboratory to Wall Street, this is a book well worth reading.

Highly recommended.
November 13, 2007

Good book  
The book describes the journey of one small biotech startup complany toward the end of the age of biotech startup companies. Its a good book if you are thinking of starting a biotech, or just think the idea is cool. This book will teach you a little about what it takes to be successfull.
May 15, 2007

A fly-on-the-wall view of a start-up  
I thought this book was a really interesting insight into what it takes to start a drug company. Being a grad student in biology, I'm definitely open to non-conventional academic options and I read this book because of that. Thrilling and well-written, Barry Werth gave an intimate account of the gruelling process of starting an independent drug company. The narrative got rather boring at times, but overall it's a worthwhile read.
February 18, 2006

Insightful  
This epic give an in-depth account of the creation of Vertex, a company formed with the hope of creating perfect drugs molecule by molecule. Such drugs would be free of side effects and worth billions. It follows the first few years of this business and Werth tells the story of the three founders and their struggles to break their product into the market, while having a viable product to sell. This cunning work demonstrates how wealth can be created through science, and how new business' can attempt make a profit.
May 05, 2005

difficult, fascinating, and compelling birth of a company  
This is the story of the first few years of Vertex, a bioventure that sought to create drugs that were constructed molecule by molecule - it is supposed to be "rational drug design". In exchange for allowing the company to check his work for accuracy and proprietary disclosures, Werth was admitted into the inner circle of the company, with both executives and scientists, for four years.

Werth offers masterful descriptions of both the science and the intricacies of the busisess deals. The work is similar to that of Tracy Kidder in "The Soul of a New Machine" and, in my opinion, of the same quality.

At the center of the story is Vertex's founding visionary, Joshua Boger, formerly a researcher at Merck. He reasoned that instead of screening soil samples and insect secretions in a hot or miss approach in thousands of petri dishes, he could design drugs atom by atom to bind to - and thus inactivate - molecules instrumental to the disease process. In theory, these drugs would be without side effects: because of the precision of the design, they would adhere to their target alone, allowing beneficial enzymes of other chem reactions to go on unimpeded.

Boger's first target molecule was FKBP, which he believed was a crucial agent of the immune system. By blocking it, he hoped to prevent the host's body from rejecting transplanted organs. While Boger was out raising money (eventually reaching $60 million), Vertex's researchers hunkered down to isolate and analyze FKBP, whose molecular mechanic remained poorly understood.

Unfortunately, what happened is a great example of the difficulties in marrying business to cutting-edge science: after over two years of pushing themselves to the brink of nervous collapse, Vertex scientists found difficulties with FKBP. Even worse, Boger's arch rival, a prof at Harvard, discovered why. The prof beat VErtex, Werth argues, because he remained outside the venture capital game and could thus concentrate totally on the science and could openly collaborate with them rather than hide proprietary results.

Nonetheless, driven and confident as ever, Boger turned his scientific team onto the new problem. Thru all of this, Boger comes off as a fascinating character: the son of a suicide, he is unshakably convinced that he can bend nature as well as the business world to his will. The reader sees what lies behind the herculean efforts of him and his team.

Warmly recommended as a rivetting tale of human endeavor that embraces the true complexity.


October 09, 2004


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