Cover image of "For Blood and Money," a book about two biotech startups

Genentech launched in 1976 to commercialize recombinant DNA technology. Ever since then, biotech has played an increasingly prominent role in the US healthcare industry. A flood of startups has explored every nook and cranny of the possibilities. Venture capitalists and medical researchers have earned billions of dollars from the lifesaving drugs the industry has created. But capitalism being what it is, the five biggest biotech companies in the US today are all legacy pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer. Johnson & Johnson. Roche. Merck. And AbbVie (originally part of Abbott Laboratories). Although some have conducted independent biotech research, most of their growth in the sector has come from buying up startup ventures. And in For Blood and Money, financial journalist Nathan Vardi follows the stories of two closely-related biotech startups from their inception to the billion-dollar fortunes they spawned—and their acquisition by much bigger companies.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Four characters stand out

For Blood and Money is the story of two companies, both biotech startups, and the three men and one woman who drove them. The cast of characters in their story is huge, but these four dominate. Two of them, Bob Duggan and Wayne Rothbaum, are wealthy, hands-on investors who both assumed day-to-day control over one of the companies. The other two, Ahmed Hamdi and Raquel Izumi, filled senior management roles at one of the companies. Then, after they were fired, they started the other firm. And the end product of all their brilliance and 16-hour workdays was that two of the four emerged as billionaires, and two did not. You might guess which were which.

For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug by Nathan Vardi (2023) 288 pages ★★★★★

Photo of scientists at work in a biotech lab like those in the two biotech startups in this book
These medical researchers are at work in one corner of a biotech lab typical of the industry in 2023. Image: Zageno

How to make a billion dollars

Unless you suffer from one of the many blood cancers, you probably haven’t heard of Pharmacyclics or Acerta. In fact, both are now subsidiaries of the larger, established drug companies AstraZeneca and AbbVie. The drugs that propelled them to riches over the past decade—Imbruvica and Calquence—both target blood cancers that are types of leukemia and lymphoma. But at any given time some 186,000 Americans struggle with one of those conditions, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). And that is the principal source of their riches.

Don’t let the fancy pharmaceutical terms or medical diagnoses scare you off. Nathan Vardi does a stellar job explaining technical details. He’s as good at it as any of the veteran science journalists I’ve read. In truth, the financial and managerial shenanigans that took place as these two companies grew are equally complex. So, if you want to know how two guys could build fortunes in the billions of dollars, reading For Blood and Money is a great place to start.

About the author

Photo of Nathan Vardi, author of this book about two biotech startups
Nathan Vardi. Image: Amazon

Nathan Vardi is a managing editor at MarketWatch and former senior editor at Forbes. He writes about big money investors, hedge funds, private equity firms, and the intersection of Wall Street and biopharma. He lives in Edgemont, New York.

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