Biotech founders and drug hunters who were unlikely to succeed, and yet they did

Robert Swanson (Genentech)

1. VC who got kicked out of his job, was almost never in touch with science. Started Genentech at 28.

2. Started a company in a climate where the government constantly wanted to shut them down

3. 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.

4. Genentech had no scientific management for years, and yet got therapy from the bench to an approved drug in a total of 4 years!

5. 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)

1. Scientologist who only had experience with some tech and developing a recipe for Mcdonalds' cookies

2. 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.

3. It didn’t have anything viable in the pipeline and had no cash to develop new things, let alone run clinical trials.

4. Got first-in-class drug approved years later (Imbruvica), selling the company for $21 billion to AbbVie

Larry Bock (Illumina)

1. Was legally blind by the age of 29

2. Founded, co-founded & backed more than 50 companies that have achieved a cumulative market capitalization of over $100 billion

Frederick Banting (Insulin)

1. Had a very slow start to his career. Failed his first degree. Got rejected from being a medic in the army twice!

2. After reading a 1920 scientific paper describing an experiment in which the pancreatic duct was tied off, became interested in isolating insulin.

3. Never managed to get a research position himself, so, to perform research, he reached out to a bunch of professors to use their lab over the summer

4. He was the first person to isolate medicine from an animal. No precedent before!

5. The youngest person to ever get a Nobel prize

James Black (first beta blocker)

1. Was in huge debts by the time he graduated

2. Had to take a teaching job to make ends meet

3. Discovered the first beta blocker, propranolol, the first agent to reduce blood pressure without diuretic effects

Katalin Kariko (mRNA vaccines)

1. Was demoted from the University because she couldn’t get funding for her research

2. The paper on nucleoside modifications she received Nobel Prize for got rejected by all major journals

Russel Earl Marker (progesterone synthesis)

1. Dropped out of grad school

2. Developed his own method to produce semi-synthetic progesterone from Mexican yams

3. Was rejected by every single American pharma when he pitched his process to produce progesterone

4. Founded Syntex, S.A.. Left it 2 years later because he was bored. The company was eventually bought by Roche

Marianna Rothblatt (United Tx)

1. Underwent gender transition in the mid-1990s

2. Motivated by her daughter Jenesis’s diagnosis with pulmonary arterial hypertension, founded United Therapeutics in 1996 with the goal of finding a cure for PAH.

3. Ended up bringing to market several treatments for PAH

4. A huge company today

Arthur Kuan (CG Oncology)

1. He was 26 when he took on the CEO role

2. One of the best-performing IPOs in biotech in 2024