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

Rating: (28 reviews) Author: Visit Amazon's Barry Werth Page ISBN : 9780671723279 New from $4.00 Format: PDF

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Amazon.com Review

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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).
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Printing edition (February 16, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671723278
• ISBN-13: 978-0671723279
• Product Dimensions: 1.2 x 6.5 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds

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

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.