On Sunday, a small biotech company called Summit Therapeutics won a remarkable victory, saying its experimental drug outperformed Merck’s Keytruda, the world’s best-selling drug, in non-small cell lung cancer, the disease that represents Keytruda’s biggest market.
By itself, Summit’s victory would be a dramatic story, although not an unheard of one in the unpredictable world of biotechnology. But it’s just the start. Because at the center of it is one of the industry’s most iconoclastic figures: Robert “Bob” Duggan, who became a billionaire after he bought up shares of another biotech company, Pharmacyclics, that was on the brink of failure, developed a breakthrough cancer drug, and sold the company to AbbVie for $21 billion.
Duggan, 80, is a living rebuke to a pharmaceutical industry self-image that is increasingly crafted in Cambridge, Mass. and San Francisco. Before Pharmacyclics, he had no drug industry experience, having worked in cookie stores and then surgical robots. He lacks a college degree, and is a practicing scientologist who told STAT in an interview that he reads the works of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard every day and who has in the past said he’d given the church more than $360 million. He speaks in long, dramatic arcs, often spelling out words, referencing their roots, or giving itemized lists.
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