List of biotech founders and drug hunters who were unlikely to succeed (and yet they did) — lada nuzhna

Cold-mailed (mailed!) Boyer to be his co-founder before there was any such thing as academia-industry collaboration (the story goes that this was the first time biologist interacted with a VC). Received a lot of backlash and bad press for doing academic-industry partnerships. Genentech had no scientific management for years, and yet got therapy from the bench to an approved drug in a total of 4 years! After a number of high-profile labs figured that cloning is not as dangerous as they thought and started catching up, he still outcompeted them all Robert Duggan (Pharmacyclics) Scientologist who only had experience with some tech and developing a recipe for Mcdonalds' cookies Started buying out stock of a biotech company that was literally about to get delisted. Overtook it when it failed all of its key clinical trials. It didn’t have anything viable in the pipeline and had no cash to develop new things, let alone run clinical trials. Got first-in-class drug approved years later (Imbruvi

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• Srushti Ishwarkatti