The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma

The $325 billion-a-year pharmaceutical business is America's most challenging and one of its most profitable. It is tougher in just about every way than any other enterprise: from the towering biological risks inherent in its mission to treat disease; to the thirty-to-one failure rate in bringing out a successful medicine aftera candidate clears all the hurdles to get to human testing; to the billion-dollar-plus cost of ramping up a successful product; to operating in the world's most highly regulated industry with the possible exception of nuclear power.

The Antidotetells the story of Vertex, a maverick drug company led by the charismatic Joshua Boger and a small group of entrepreneurial young scientists who broke off from Merck when it was the world's best drug maker-indeed the most admired business in America-because they thought they could make drugs better. Building upon his widely praised The Billion-Dollar Molecule, Barry Werth captures the full scope of Vertex's twenty-five-year drive to deliver breakthrough medicines and transform the drug industry.

The Antidote draws upon unprecedented inside reporting spanning more than two decades to provide a ground-breaking close-up of Vertex's inner workings and the ferocious but indispensable world it inhabits.