For Blood and Money by Nathan Vardi

Author:Nathan Vardi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

CHAPTER 14

Approved

Ahmed Hamdy was trying to put his son to sleep when he got an incomprensible audio message on his cell phone from Bob Duggan, who seemed to want to check in on him.

It was not clear to Hamdy what Duggan wanted or why he called. The message was ambiguous. Hamdy had not heard from Duggan since being fired from Pharmacyclics, and to Hamdy the whole thing was creepy and even threatening.

On a morning soon after, Hamdy saw a suspicious-looking white van parked outside the gated community where he lived. He called up Wayne Rothbaum in a panic to tell him about the van and play him the audio message.

Hamdy was scared of Duggan. He knew that stepping back into Duggan’s world would leave him open to attack—but Hamdy always assumed it would be a corporate or legal attack. Now he wondered if he could also face an actual intrusion into his personal life. Hamdy thought again about trying to steer his new venture away from cancer treatment but knew his new team would never agree. He was trapped in a self-inflicted spiral of nerves.

Hamdy confided in the Acerta team and explained what had happened. Most of the others were not as shaken. Some listened to the audio message and thought it may have been an accidental pocket dial. Over time, Duggan became something of a boogeyman at Acerta. Staff would joke that team members should watch out for lurking white vans. Duggan’s close ties to the Church of Scientology and the aggressive way it was known to go after its adversaries fed the uneasiness. Anxiety only increased when an Acerta laptop mysteriously vanished from the trunk of a car in the Netherlands. The thief had left other more valuable items behind.

There was no evidence that Duggan or Pharmacyclics had been involved with any of this. Duggan always said he didn’t care about what Acerta was doing and that he wished his former colleagues well. He claimed to have never left an audio message for Hamdy. Some people at Acerta thought Hamdy had an overactive imagination.

In one sense, Pharmacyclics and Acerta were in a race. Each had a BTK inhibitor that seemed to stop CLL, and both were ultimately seeking FDA approval. But Duggan and Pharmacyclics had a massive head start. Whether or not Duggan knew or cared about the work being done at Acerta had no impact on Pharmacyclics’ forward momentum. In the summer of 2013, Duggan’s clinical and regulatory team at Pharmacyclics mapped out a bold strategy to seek accelerated approval from the FDA for two conditions, mantle cell lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, where patients had received at least one previous treatment. Even though Pharmacyclics had still accumulated only a small amount of data involving relatively few patients, the company thought that the quality of the results could lead to two simultaneous accelerated approvals.

Urte Gayko, Pharmacyclics’ head of regulatory affairs, had planned out critical parts of the strategy while on a plane returning to California from a meeting with FDA regulators.

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