The billion-dollar molecule
by Barry Werth · first published 1994
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The Billion-Dollar Molecule raises the curtain on the fascinating and tumultuous drama of a radically new start-up pharmaceutical company. That company, Vertex, is trying to design a lifesaving new drug that - if it works - will prove the potential of a brand-new drug-making technique and also fulfill the vision of Vertex's founder and chairman, Joshua Boger, one of the most promising scientists of his generation. In early 1989 the thirty-seven-year-old Boger set out to revolutionize the drug industry, the most profitable industry in existence. Trained at Harvard and at Merck, the premier biom
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To add some that haven't already been listed here: - The Billion Dollar Molecule: story of Vertex pharmaceuticals and their new approach to drug design - The Double Helix: story of the discovery of the structure of DNA by one of the principal scientists involved (Watson) More of…
on “Ask HN: Good Books on the History of Technology?” ↗I loved the book The Billion Dollar Molecule (Reviewed by Nature here: https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt0594-521.pdf) about the founding of Vertex Pharma. Really drives home the amount of money, time and luck it takes to make a breakthrough -…
on “Cystic fibrosis breakthrough has given patients a chance to live longer” ↗The book "The Billion Dollar Molecule" is about the founding of Vertex Pharma. Worth a read.
on “Cystic fibrosis breakthrough has given patients a chance to live longer” ↗…years ago. Big articles were written about Vertex applying Free Energy Perturbation with pictures of Murcko accompanied by David Pearlman and Govinda Bhisetti. A book was written about these efforts, The Billion-Dollar Molecule, and more recently a sequel which partially describes how Vertex's efforts using these methods failed (The Antidote). Obviously, computational power has improved by orders of magnitude since 1989. So…
on “The Quant King, the Drug Hunter, and the Quest to Unlock New Cures” ↗drug research overall falls into a "natural oligopoly" .. the research is lengthy and expensive, yet the occasional "winner" can be generations of income. IIR a book on the industry is called "The Billion Dollar Molecule" meanwhile, some of the obnoxiously, obscenely wealthy individuals in the USA are running small pharm brands, either supplements or critical medicines. This wealth-crowbar was exposed to the public by…
on “The global fight against HIV is at risk” ↗