BioTech Five is one of seven research buildings in the Virginia BioTechnology Park in Richmond, Virginia. One block north of the Coliseum, it’s tucked between a group of horseshoe-shaped buildings to the east and south, and BioTech Three to the west. The entire third floor, almost twelve thousand square feet, is dedicated to the corporate offices of Veritas Pharmaceutical. The office of Bruce Andrews, CEO of the company, occupies the southeast corner, with a partial view of the Coliseum and City Hall. But the view was the last thing on Andrews’s mind this particular Wednesday morning. He sat with his back to the window, peering at his computer screen.
An imposing man, over six feet four, Bruce Andrews had the body of a pro linebacker-for a good reason. For two years he was one, playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers, crushing opponents into the natural turf and enjoying every minute of it. He was selected to the Pro Bowl in his sophomore year, but one of his own teammates was flattened by a running back and fell back, landing on Andrews’s knee and tearing the anterior cruciate ligament. A professional sporting career was erased in a few seconds of agonizing pain. The upside was that Andrews had a 3.8 GPA in the sciences even as he was playing college ball at Stanford. He took his degree and entered the pharmaceutical business as a researcher.
Andrews was a good catch. He was bright, well-connected, and extroverted. His face was well proportioned, with a prominent chin and inquiring eyes. He had an easy smile, which disarmed most people within a few seconds of meeting him. And in the research industry, where most of the staff are graduates of college chess and glee clubs, a physically attractive employee with good social skills was worth his weight in platinum, not gold.
Looking at the career offers on the table, Marcon was his first choice, and when they offered him a position in R amp;D working at the new one-hundred-million-dollar research facility bordering Harvard Medical School, he had to control his shaking hand as he signed the contract. Four years later, he reluctantly closed the door behind him as he left for Frezin, one of Marcon’s top rivals and another of the Big Pharma companies. Frezin’s offer was too generous to turn down: his own research group, an excellent salary, bonuses for meeting or exceeding expectations in Phase I and Phase II trials, and totally flexible office hours.
He excelled at Frezin, clearing the way for two new cholesterol drugs, one of which found a spot on the crowded shelves of America’s pharmacies and generated almost six hundred million in sales before the patent expired and the generics jumped in. His success in the research labs led to a high-level management position, at which he immediately excelled. He reworked the Frezin mindset on R amp;D, modeling it after what he had seen at Marcon.
It worked. It worked very well. Frezin passed Marcon on the Standard amp; Poor’s 500 Index and the bellwether Domini 400 Social Index, putting Frezin in the enviable position of being the new benchmark in pharmaceutical research and development. His salary went through the roof, and his bonuses eclipsed his wages. He had found his niche and was enjoying huge personal success, despite the public’s dislike and distrust of the pharmaceutical giants. Bruce Andrews often looked back on the day that 260-pound lineman crushed his knee as a great day in his life.
But even with all the perks and the money, he was, in his own mind, still a lowly vice president. He coveted the top position, but after a few years he realized that he was not moving in that direction. The upper echelons of Frezin were powerful and connected, and he was not one of the chosen. He realized that if he were to ever achieve the position of CEO, it would entail moving to a competitor. He found a heavyweight headhunter and the search to find a company that needed a CEO was under way.
Veritas Pharmaceutical was not a major player in the industry, but neither was it a lightweight. Four drugs with household names were under patent, and three more were in the pipeline. Wall Street was behind Veritas and investor confidence was high. What they lacked was vision. And when the board of directors interviewed Bruce Andrews, they knew they had found their visionary.
Andrews’s agent drafted a ten-year contract, collected a huge finder’s fee, and disappeared back where he came from. Andrews planted himself in the corner office and took stock of his new empire. The company had annual sales of six hundred million, which Andrews considered low, considering the company had four drugs still under patent on the market. Their R amp;D budget was $162 million, marketing $73 million, and administration $12 million. Legal fees and payments on class-action suits ran to almost $200 million, courtesy of an FDA recall on Haldion, a drug that was designed to reduce blood pressure but actually caused heart palpitations. Not heart attacks or death, at least not that had been proven-simply palpitations. Veritas had pulled the drug from the market, but the damage was done. The ambulance chasers were all over it, and tort suits kept appearing, even seven years after the negative reports had chased Haldion from the shelves.
Andrews rearranged the financing within his first three months as CEO. R amp;D remained constant at just under $170 million, but marketing shot up to $240 million. He brought in a team of image consultants and lawyers, and focused on stopping the bleeding from the class-action suits on Haldion. The first tort action against Veritas after he took the helm was from a medium-size law firm in Kansas. Andrews unleashed his new legal team on the unsuspecting lawyers and let them know that the free ride was over. Every legal action against Veritas as a result of a client suffering from the side effects of Haldion would be vigorously challenged in court. No more cash.
The majority of claims against Haldion had already been initiated and settlements reached, and his company was now fighting an attack by hundreds of small law firms with one or two clients. The power of numbers was lost now that the large tort suits had been dealt with, and the image spin doctors sent a clear message to the press. Sue Veritas and you’ve got a fight. The Kansas lawyers took one look at their return on the suit and dropped the case. One by one the lawsuits disappeared as legal firms across the country realized they would have to face Veritas in court. The bleeding was stemmed. Two hundred million dollars a year in savings. Investors liked what they saw, and Veritas’s stock shot up.
The new image that Veritas and its market-savvy consultants began pumping out to the public was that they were a modern-day Marcon, taking over where the pharmaceutical giant had once stood. They were sympathetic to the little guy and committed to bringing down the price of drugs, especially for seniors and those on fixed incomes. Andrews coaxed his legal hound dogs to get creative and find new ways of extending patent lives on three of the company’s existing drugs. When they did, by patenting the metabolite synthesized by the drugs once in the patient’s body, it guaranteed Veritas over seven hundred million in income for another three years.
Wall Street noticed. A new and aggressive Marcon had been born, and investors lined up like lemmings to grab chunks of Veritas before it punctured another hole in the ozone layer. Veritas surged into the Fortune 500 list, and Bruce Andrews’s face was plastered on the covers of Financial Times, Forbes, and Time. Life at Veritas was perfect. Except for one small detail.
Everything about Veritas was a lie.
Haldion did cause palpitations, and those palpitations sometimes led to cardiac arrest, which in turn occasionally led to the morgue. The claims against Veritas, while now ineffective, were often legitimate. And while the image Veritas portrayed to the public was one of a corporation that cared, people were dying because of the drug. And that wasn’t the only FDA-approved drug with problems. Triaxcion was a disaster looking for a home. The antibalding drug, which halted the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, also caused clotting factors to fail in some people with A-positive blood. So far, the image experts had held their fingers in the proverbial dike, but the waters were threatening to overflow the dam itself. And now, as Andrews sat at his keyboard, he knew they had a problem inside the company.
Being a cautious man, he had covertly asked one of his programming staff to insert a packet sniffer into the company software. It ran a constant stream of cross-correlations and nonlinear filters, looking for any employee who accessed the confidential research files on any drugs, whether FDA approved or in Phase IV or later development. Andrews wanted to know who the whistle-blowers were before they had time to type up a demand letter. And now he had one.
Albert Rousseau. One of the research rats working in their statin department on the latest cholesterol drugs. His computer had accessed a number of restricted files over the past few weeks. On each occasion, he had inserted a few lines of code in his search engine, spoofing the detection software to other terminals belonging to other employees. But the sniffer was one byte smarter than Rousseau. Because it was nonlinear, it recognized patterns otherwise untraceable. And the one thing Andrews was certain of was that Albert Rousseau was positioning himself to deliver a pay-or-suffer letter to Veritas. That was something that Bruce Andrews could not allow to happen.
He picked up his phone and dialed a number from memory. It was time for Albert Rousseau to take a vacation.
A permanent one.