An interesting tale of how personal ambition, scientific curiosity, and the pursuit of wealth led to life-extending drugs.
The story of two small biotech firms who vied to dominate the market for a cancer drug and reaped billions of dollars in compensation.
During the “great biotechnology decade of the 2010s,” Pharmacyclics and Acerta, both based in California, worked feverishly to develop a new drug that used BTK inhibitors to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia with minimal side effects. Vardi, managing editor at MarketWatch and former senior editor at Forbes, tells a fascinating story of the science behind this approach and the financial arrangements, medical controversies, regulatory processes, and business rivalries without which the two competing drugs—Imbruvica and Calquence—would not have become publicly available. Driving the quest was the possibility of huge sales; in 2020, Imbruvica had $6.6 billion in revenues. Such sales would enable the companies to be sold to bigger biotech companies, with massive payouts to investors and management. The major investor in Pharmacyclics, for example, made $3.5 billion on his $50 million investment. Vardi brings readers on to significant phone calls, places them at management meetings, and reveals in detail the deliberations that occurred among investors, medical officers, hospital doctors, and federal regulators. We learn the backstories of the key participants and the science and politics behind experimental drug trials, the competition among venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, and the strategic calculations of big pharma (Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca) as it engaged the “small biotech companies with experimental therapies” then dominating research and development. Tens of thousands of patients eventually benefitted, although the financial burden—a blood cancer drug can cost $10,000 per month and has to be taken for the duration of the patient’s life—is staggering. The book will appeal to readers of Brendan Borrell’s The First Shot and Gregory Zuckerman’s A Shot To Save the World.
An interesting tale of how personal ambition, scientific curiosity, and the pursuit of wealth led to life-extending drugs.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-393-54095-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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