The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma (56 page)

“I think on the script there was something to the effect that, ‘This in no way is a reflection on your performance,’ and he offered to write me a reference or be helpful to me in that sense if I needed it. Then he handed me over to Lisa Kelly-Crosswell. She was one office over. She walked me
through the procedure and suggested I go home. I said, ‘Well, I want to clean out my office and say good-bye to people.’ She said, ‘Sure, we’ll set that up.’ I found out when I got back to my office that they had turned off my email.”

Murcko drove home, switching swiftly into “detached, objective, scientist mode. It was all very, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’ ” No one at Vertex except possibly Thomson had worked harder to realize Boger’s vision. Murcko had a major role in finding every one of Vertex’s breakthrough molecules now on the market or in the clinic: from codirecting the “project from central casting” in HIV; to modeling the core structure of the ICE inhibitor pralnacasan, which generated the company’s experimental medicine for epilepsy; to being a coinventor of Incivek; to nurturing the CF work at Aurora and bringing Olson to Cambridge to shepherd it through; to championing the kinase program that made the JAK-3 inhibitor and driving the phenotypic screening approach that produced the flu drug. As word got out, as another torchbearer put it, that he’d been “kicked to the curb,” emotions in the labs, offices, and cubicles flashed over.

Knives came out for Mueller, who himself could be cutting, not in person but behind others’ backs. Everyone had seen him berate fellow scientists in public, in the hallways, when they weren’t around to defend themselves. The coldness of his actions seemed to some of the old guard to betray a desire to assassinate those who dared still challenge him. Mueller had advanced Vertex’s science, but he had inherited it and wasn’t responsible for finding the drugs that had brought it to this point, diminishing his primacy in the eyes of those who knew the fuller story. “Peter is like an alpha wolf,” a veteran researcher muttered. “He needs displays of submission. Mark wouldn’t do the public submissive rollover behavior that Peter required.” For those who valued Vertex’s original spirit, the organization’s apparent thanklessness opened a gaping distrust, not just with Mueller but the company itself, what it stood for. “There is no more Vertex,” someone said, raising the specter of defections. “Vertex is dead. They should call it something else.”

Mueller moved on decisively. “Honorable Colleagues,” he began the reorganization email distributed companywide the next morning. In
outlining major personnel shuffles throughout research, global development, and medical affairs, he stressed the need for sustainability and congratulated Namchuk, Wright, Trish Hurter, Tara Kieffer, and a dozen others who had been promoted into new leadership roles. At the end he wrote: “In conjunction with these changes, Mark Murko [
sic
], Jack Weet, Paul Caron . . . [three others were named] have left Vertex. Please join me in thanking them for their contributions and wishing them well in the future.” The previous week, Weet, exhausted, had finished driving the new drug appliction for VX-770 through the FDA portal, eleven months after delivering the NDA for Incivek. Caron was the modeler who in the earliest days had predicted that the active site of HCV protease would be monstrously hard to inhibit—“a bowling ball.”

Mueller and his team rolled out the changes in a series of presentations. Namchuk, a popular scientific manager who’d been with Vertex since before the Novartis collaboration, delivered a pep talk in JB-II. “We’ve got to do better than we are,” he told a packed audience. “Our job is to invent first-in-class medicines faster and better than everyone else. We may be close to the top now, but I think we have to be even better in the next few years.” Without mentioning the reorganization’s casualties, he referred in passing to “legacy pieces left in that confused the new structure.”

Namchuk spoke excitedly and at length about several research projects, notably a Cambridge-based effort to correct the underlying cause of multiple sclerosis, an autoimmunity in which the fatty myelin sheaths around the nerves of the brain and spinal cord are damaged, leading to scarring and a host of painful, debilitating symptoms. The hallmark of the disease is the loss of myelin, which, like insulation on a wire, helps the cells conduct electricity. Lose the sheath, and the nerve eventually dies. Vertex scientists had labored for two and a half years to develop a novel assay: basically an MS brain in a test tube. “We took all the component parts of the brain, took them apart, put them in a dish, gave them MS, saw if we could reverse it, and then put all the parts together and see if we did everything right,” Namchuk said. Their goal was to find small molecules to stimulate cells already in the brain to fix the damaged myelin.

“They’re sort of like the Red Sox pitching staff,” he explained. “They’re sitting in the clubhouse, eating chicken and drinking beer. And so what we have to figure out more successfully than [Sox manager] Terry Francona, is how do we get them to jump in, to do some good before it’s too late and we’re out of the play-offs. What we’re trying to do is stimulate this growth and cause these cells to wrap around that nerve.”

Namchuk showed slides of cell cultures saturated with rejuvenating myelin, spidery dyed lines showing that its lead compounds had activated the cells, which had “gotten up off the bench” and were trying to reinsulate denuded neurons. Like Fred Van Goor’s movies of reactivated cilia in the bronchial cells of patients with CF, the images were visual confirmation of Vertex’s approach and a driving totem for the chemists now optimizing the molecules, although any other parallels between the two projects at this point were thin. CF was a well-thought-out, clear, well-executed program, with a single, coherent team of people working fanatically, a well-understood target, and total support from the foundation. At the moment, despite Namchuk’s tantalizing pictures and flair for analogy, Vertex possessed none of this in MS.

Murcko returned quietly on Friday to say his good-byes and clean out his office. Like other predevelopment candidates, the MS compounds were a promising but distant hope. One of them might come to market a decade from now, if ever. Mueller’s challenge was to see beyond the curve, to the possibilities for the next generation of medicines and the one beyond that. Yet by his decision to jettison Murcko, he ensured that Vertex would have to meet it without the company’s most seasoned, deepest-thinking drug hunter; without the person most fluent in emerging technologies and, more to the point, when they were ripe for exploitation and how to marshal them. Murcko was melancholy, writing in an email: “Honestly, I wonder how long it will take before at least some people start to whisper about how ineffective I was and how this was a kindness . . . it seems never to be the case that someone’s reputation grows after they leave.” Boxing up his books and papers, Murcko didn’t complain to the steady stream of well-wishers, many in tears. He resolved to be a good soldier, vowing to himself, for the company’s sake and in right-stuff spirit, “not to be an asshole.” Later he said:

The not-being-an-asshole rule is really important to me, because I can imagine, being in a situation like this, you could allow yourself to say things that might be perfectly justified, and defensible in a court of law, but which afterward, nonetheless, you would feel like a rat for having said them. So I’m trying not to go down that road.

But I do have to wonder what it means when a situation like this is handled in this sort of way. Certainly I know people at other organizations who have been in similar situations who ended up landing better, where there was more of a conversation of where to go from here, what to do next, some sort of transitional period. None of which happened in this case, which strikes me as odd. It also strikes me as inefficient, because certainly there were things I could continue to do for Vertex in some sort of transitional role. There may be good arguments against that. Whether there’s a larger lesson or not for Vertex I can’t say for sure, but I’ve had a number of people say to me that they thought what happened in this particular case, not just to me but to the other folks who were let go, was brutal. And if that’s an accurate reflection of what happened to us, I have to ask what that says about the organization. Hopefully nothing. It’s just an aberration and not an aspect of some larger change in the culture.

Two days before the Q3 earnings call, Emmens charted his succession. The directors wanted him to stay on as CEO, but he’d convinced them that what Vertex needed next was both an “operations guy” and a top scientist—someone who in the coming few years, before the next great commercial breakthrough after CF, could focus the company as it matured.

The board had culled through thirty candidates but so far had reached no consensus. Emmens resolved to announce a change by the end of the year. In particular, he believed Vertex needed a leader who could come in and adapt, rather than someone who would think of it as his—or, far less likely, her—company. Also, he thought, the situation required a strong counterweight to Mueller, not a taskmaster but someone subtle enough, with the right balance of emotional intelligence and scientific sophistication, to handle his complicated temperament. Emmens:

Peter’s funny, because what you see is not what I see. He’s very, very demanding. He’s a control guy. That’s what made him good in bringing the right products forward and making the time frame to market. But he models it. He works like a dog, big hours. The answer is never, “No, I can’t do that.” It’s always, “Yes.” And with
me
, Peter’s also a very good employee, because when I say, “Peter, I’d like to do this,” it’s, “Yes sir.” So I’m very careful about what I say to Peter, because if I say we’re not gonna do cancer anymore, he might put up a little fight, but he’d cut the whole place out. Just like that. He’s not who you think he is.

In a way, Peter is very easy to manage if you let him do what jazzes him, which is in the best interest of the company right now. I want somebody who wants to watch what he does, understand it, put it in the bigger context, and help him do it. If you do that, you’ll keep Peter, you’ll keep him happy, you’ll keep him engaged. Peter likes to learn. He’s always learning. If he ever gets bored here he’ll leave. He’s an unusual character.

After the markets closed late on Thursday afternoon, October 27, Emmens, Mueller, Smith, Wysenski, Kauffman, Pace, and Partridge took their usual seats for the Q3 earnings call. Their going-in strategy aimed to blunt the momentum of the shorts with blowout earnings figures and a convincing commercial vision to show that Incivek sales weren’t flattening five months after launch. “I think our tone should be giddy, not cocky,” Emmens instructed. “Very, very confident.”

Representing the company’s operations in the first full quarter since the launch, the numbers conveyed multiple meanings. It was the first time in Vertex’s twenty-two-year history that it had generated a quarterly profit from its own product sales: a potent rebuke to the IMS confusion, which had resulted in the data firm releasing three separate product bulletins correcting for misleading scrip estimates; a gauntlet thrown down to the analysts; a powerful vindication for Emmens, Wysenski, and their strategy; and a crystal ball into the future, specifically the next fifteen months, since what the Street would look for would be a weekly run-rate from which to extrapolate earnings through 2012.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Mueller said, handicapping the call. “Tomorrow something will happen, and they’ll jump out the window again.”

“There’s an optimist for you,” Kauffman said.

“One of the guys did a study that R&D heads that are German, once they get their first drug approved, they’re not productive anymore,” Emmens told Mueller.

“But they’re from Frankfurt.”

As Partridge contacted the operator to start the call, Smith cut in. “These guys are never wrong,” he said. “Don’t rise to the bait.” After a decade of finessing a mounting burn rate by stoking ever-higher hopes for the business—and two weeks of grinding through the volatility over IMS—Smith gleefully disclosed the third-quarter results. Revenues for the quarter were $659 million, a twenty-five-fold increase from a year earlier. Net product sales of Incivek were $420 million, beating expectations handily. Vertex declared a profit of more than $1 per share, with income totaling $221 million. Smith, who had pushed hard for the release, revealed internal data showing that Incivek sales had reached $40 million to $45 million per week in September and October, a run rate implying fourth-quarter sales of $520 million to $585 million, far above the current consensus of $411 million.