After the fire of the movie "I Am Not a Medicine God", pharmaceutical companies representing "huge profits" were once criticized. But after reading the latest book " Billion Dollar Molecule " , you may have a different understanding of innovative pharmaceutical companies.
"Billion Dollar Molecule" tells the story of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a well-known pharmaceutical company, which has been commercially successful in less than three years from its birth to its listing.
But unlike the entrepreneurial history that is accustomed to writing after "success", the author Barry Werth is a famous American journalist, and the founder of Forte has the same adventurous spirit, from 1989 when Forte is still an unknown small company, he intervened in observation, ate and lived with employees for three years, truly recorded the differences and contradictions within the company, cooperation and competition between enterprises, the game between ideals and capital, and finally presented a vivid and completely different perspective of entrepreneurial history.
At the same time, as a documentary writer, Wirth also jumped out of the trap of being easily limited to the company itself, and demonstrated the ambition to pursue "big history" writing with fascinating narrative techniques, placing the growth history of Forte in a broader context of 20th century medical history. From the outbreak of the flu in 1918, the research of penicillin in World War II, the beginning of organ transplantation in the early 90s, and then to the downturn in the US economy at the end of the last century and the rise of Japanese-funded enterprises, a large number of "stars" in the pharmaceutical and investment circles were interspersed, which can be described as "brilliant stars".
In 2019, it is the "30th birthday" of Forte Pharmaceuticals, and "Billion Dollar Molecule" has also been a best-seller in the United States for 25 years. Although the Chinese edition was only recently published, in the view of the translator Qian Pengzhan, this edition is "born at the right time" because the rise, power and investment environment facing Chinese pharmaceutical companies today are too similar to the United States 30 years ago.
The departure and rise of Merck's "contrarian son"
The establishment of Forte Pharmaceutical is also a story of the departure and rise of the "contrarian son" in the pharmaceutical industry.
Founder Joshua Boger, who graduated from harvard chemistry with a Ph.D., then worked for the world-renowned pharmaceutical company Ms. Merck (MSD), becoming a shining new star. At the age of 35, he became a senior director of basic chemistry, holds 17 patents, and is considered a strong candidate to run Merck's $1 billion a year in research funding – one of the most powerful biopharmaceutical positions in the world, and countless people flock to it.
In 1989, however, Borg abruptly decided to quit his job to start a new pharmaceutical company, Forte Pharmaceuticals, with which Merck's relationship changed from a former employer to a competitor.
At the beginning of its establishment, Forte did not have any scientific research results, only more than a dozen scientists who were eager to try. Although he received $10 million in venture capital, he burned nearly $100,000 a week. Despite setbacks during its founding, Forte was successfully listed in 1991, with a market capitalization of $45 billion in May 2018, ranking among the top 30 pharmaceutical companies in the world. Among them, the main cystic fibrosis drug Kalydeco is the world's first drug that directly targets the pathogenic gene of the disease, and is known as "the most important drug in 2012".
"Billion Dollar Molecule" focuses on the critical period from the establishment of Forte to its listing. In 2014, Wirth published a new book, "The Antidote", as a "sequel" to the continued development of Forte in the next 20 years.
Qian Pengzhan said that the reason why Worth's first book on Futai was named "Billion Dollar Molecule" has two meanings. One is that innovative drug research and development costs are high, requiring a billion dollars of investment to get a new drug. Just like at the beginning of the book, the camera is focused on the Borg, whose R&D budget is stretched, still appears confidently and exquisitely in the luxury star hotel in the center of New York, hoping to seize the opportunity to introduce the company to the 150 investors present in order to obtain capital favor.
In addition, the "billion dollar molecule" is also a recognition of successful drugs - the pharmaceutical industry has a similar term "blockbuster", which means that if a drug reaches more than one billion dollars in annual sales, it can be regarded as success. "Of course, this is already the saying of the 90s of the last century. Now that the cost of drug research and development has risen, there is already a 'two billion US dollars' argument, and the annual sales of drugs have also increased, even reaching more than 10 billion US dollars. This was previously unthinkable. Qian Pengzhan said.
Truly show the internal contradictions of entrepreneurial enterprises
In Qian Pengzhan's view, the biggest feature in the writing of "Billion Dollar Molecule" is that it is a record rather than a memoir, leaving a large number of precious first-hand original materials, and the entrepreneurial history presented is obviously different from the general successful enterprise history, whether it is content, perspective or depth.
For three years, Wirth "went undercover" in Forte, observing the hardships of scientists' scientific research and financing at close range. "Worth's approach is a bit of a traditional Chinese historiography of 'not hidden evil, not vain beauty', a true record of various things happening in startups, especially contradictions and decisions." In the general corporate memoirs, the contradictions that appear in the development of the enterprise are basically hidden. ”
Wirth is particularly vivid in showing the mutual "contempt" between American academic and industrial scientists, and the conflict that inevitably arises when the Borg tries to bring the two sides together in Forte.
Contradictions arise in the first chapter. The team includes Schreiber, a pioneer in chemical biology at Harvard University, who is both a scientific advisor and a potential rival to Forte, so Borg cannot trust him sufficiently. So at a conference, when Schreiber tested "what Fotai could do", Wirth captured the scientists at that time "looking at each other" or "staring at their shoes", and Borg also took care of his subtle scenes, vividly showing the internal contradictions under Sven's cover.
Many of Forte's decision-making processes, because the author is always in a state of observation, find that it is actually very casual and accidental. This is quite different from many routinely written corporate histories that highlight the boldness, way of thinking, or power of a founder as soon as decisions are made. For example, in April 1989, before Burger went to New York to seek investment, he held a strategy meeting and met for the first time with some scientific consultants. At that time, the meeting place was in the company's temporary restaurant, and the environment was simply terrible: after the workers used the electric drill to make holes everywhere, the books, boxes, and clothes in the room were stained with mud; the ceiling on the roof was also removed, revealing pipes that had not yet been spliced... Everything is very messy, and the so-called "strategic decision-making" is not very rigorous.
In addition, "Billion Dollars" is not limited to the entrepreneurial history of the company itself, but also spends a lot of ink on many companies associated with it, such as the famous Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which was struggling internally and externally because of its insistence on developing drugs with unclear prospects to treat "frozen people". But regeneration yuan company does not have its own corporate history, and this trough of development is preserved in "Billion Dollar Molecule".
Exposing the humanity of capital and ideals
The "grand view of history" is a narrative technique favored by many historians. This book is no exception, the author of the 20th century medical history of many historical events, important figures, are condensed and interspersed in forte short three years of entrepreneurial story, so that the narrative background is deep and broad: how the global influenza outbreak in 1918 prompted the transformation of traditional medicine to modern medicine, how Merck in the 1930s how in the 1930s in the production of "jianghu plaster" in the pharmaceutical companies struggled to start, the invention of penicillin in the 40s saved countless lives... In addition, by describing Another Borg competitor, Stazier, the father of liver transplantation, Wirth also vividly shows the thrilling scenes of life and death in the history of organ transplant surgery, in which patients and doctors face life and death together.
Borg's departure from Merck was because he was idealistic and wanted to find a new approach to drug design to disrupt the old pharmaceutical model. However, the pharmaceutical industry is a high-risk, high-investment industry, with huge upfront investment, and no one knows whether it will be successful in the end. Therefore, the book also spends a considerable amount of time to show the struggle and confusion of obtaining capital support and playing with capital in the process of drug research and development and production. As Worth puts it, "You need money to do your research, but you need to go against the spirit of science and create an illusion to make your project appear competitive and attract money." In order to go public, Borg also showed a very world-sensitive side of his personality, good at carefully speculating on wall Street and capital preferences, and learning to "tell stories" to cater to their investment tastes.
"Science follows the money." In his book, Worth also exposes the other side of human nature that scientists expose when research in a certain field receives attention and government funding. For example, when AIDS broke out around the world in 1987, it spawned a wave of scientific research. At this time, many scientists who "judged the situation" changed the ending from "may be used to treat cancer" to "may be used to treat AIDS" when applying for the project. In a short period of time, many AIDS research companies were quickly established and then quickly sold to Wall Street...
Fast forward to the blink of an eye, forte's story is 30 years ago, but history is always familiar. Qian Pengzhan said that 10 years ago, China's drug research and development and production was still based on imitation, and now, innovative drug research and development has become a prominent study, the pharmaceutical environment is very close to the United States at that time, are in the stage of force and catch-up, and many innovative pharmaceutical companies have emerged. At the same time, like Japan's Sino-foreign pharmaceutical co., Ltd., which originally wanted to seek investment opportunities in the United States, there are many capitals in the Chinese market that are now active in the Chinese market.
Perhaps at this time, looking at the road that Forte has traveled, Chinese pharmaceutical companies can read more enlightenment from it.
"Billion Dollar Molecule"
By Barry Worth
Shanghai Science and Technology Education Press, December 2018 edition