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

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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. 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.

Reader Reviews:

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.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.

A thouroughly enjoyable read, Werth sheds light on the personaliteis and complexities of an amazing and multifaceted business. Throughout, the author uncovers the unseen deal-making, hand-wringing, and fist clenching that dominate the start of Vertex, a strucure-based paharmaceutical firm.

I particularly enjoyed the background on the Boger-Schreiber collaboration and rivalry, and the ensuing rivalry in Vertex's own labs. Further, following the last few years of Vertex's ups and downs via the Internet has been thoroughly enjoyable.

Werth's style is easliy read, and his obvious unhindered access to Vertex and its people make the story enjoyable, suspenseful, and dramatic.This book garnered fifteen five star reviews at Amazon.com. Frankly I don't see how. After sloughing through 250 pages of exasperatingly detailed, fictionalized melodrama, I returned this book to the library.

"BILLION DOLLAR MOLECULE: THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT DRUG" by Barry Werth is a diatribe against the defenseless scientists it purports to portray and reflects a jaded perspective that tells us more about Werth's dim view of human nature than about how Vertex became a success.

The characters are sketched almost uniformly as embodying the worst traits in human nature: narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, petty, conniving, ruthless schemers, and academic back stabbers. The character of one Dr. Schreiber, a distinguished researcher and scientist, is pummeled into submission, portrayed as utterly base, calculating and disingenuous. Schreiber is Mr. Werth's straight man, a punching bag for the author's preoccupation with uncovering the ugliness that mysteriously lurks within the rarefied air of scientific enterprise. This book offers up a Machiavellian smorgasbord of character flaws, a feast of delights for those who enjoy a good food fight along with their meal.

Werth portrays his characters, mostly scientists, as inveterate workaholics, utterly clueless as to the meaning of work-life balance, driven to the point of destroying their health even as they seek to create drugs that save and extend the lives of others.

The overwhelming focus on the cult of personality severely detracts from the book's message. It is simply implausible to believe that such top caliber scientists with stellar records of scientific achievement climbed to the top by dropping sludge from the back of a truck and treating their colleagues like adolescent brothers a couple of years apart. Perhaps this is the way Barry Werth sees the world, but it is a jaundiced view in my opinion. I simply refuse to believe that the prototypical biotech entrepreneur is a clone of Samuel Waksal.

This book fails to clearly explain the biological context of its more challenging scientific concepts. Mr. Werth assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader as if this book was written for the life science cognoscenti to gossip about at the water cooler.

Werth often has little or no regard for the terms he so loosely bandies about. Why wasn't there a glossary to explain the more esoteric terms in the text? Would it have been so difficult to include a few skeletal illustrations for those without a strong background in molecular biology or proteomics? Even Michael Crichton includes some reference material in his books and they are fiction.

This book, a 464 page soap opera, is more helium than substance and that is being charitable. It is really a book about Mr. Werth's phantasmagoric view of how new drug discovery proceeds. I would venture that the sordid descriptions pinned to these characters would leave them aghast (if they had time to come up for air), their distinguished careers warped in a series of fun house mirrors. Or perhaps, given the utter implausibility of the portrayals, these folks had a good laugh about it, chalking it up as historical satire, reality TV with a scientific aura.

This book could have aptly been named "Who Moved My Cheese from the Lab While I Was on Steroids". I read this book to gain an inside view of biotechnology discovery, but the view I ended up with was one of fantasy, a parallel universe where the noble pursuit of scientific discovery is trumped by a Darth Vader triple helix of avarice, greed and cynicism - a universe I won't be visiting any time soon.awesome book about a start up in the pharmaceutical industry. a must for everybody who works in this field or who thinks about founding a company in the chemical/pharmaceutical/biochemical field. a must read!
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