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The Cell Game: Sam Waksal's Fast Money and False Promises--and the Fate of ImClone's Cancer Drug
It began with a promising cancer drug, the brainchild of a gifted researcher, and grew into an insider trading scandal that ensnared one of America's most successful women. The story of ImClone Systems and its "miracle" cancer drug, Erbitux, is the quintessential business saga of the late 1990s. It's the story of big money and cutting-edgescience, celebrity, greed, and slipshod business practices; the story of biotech hype and hope and every kind of excess. At the center of it all stands a single, enigmatic figure named Sam Waksal. A brilliant, mercurial, and desperate-to-be-liked entrepreneur, Waksal was addicted to the trappings of wealth and fame that accrued to a darling of the stock market and the overheated atmosphere of biotech IPOs. At the height of his stardom, Waksal hobnobbed with Martha Stewart in New York and Carl Icahn in the Hamptons, hosted parties at his fabulous art-filled loft, and was a fixture in the gossip columns. He promised that Erbitux would "change oncology," and would soon be making $1 billion a year. But as Waksal partied late into the night, desperate cancer patients languished, waiting for his drug to come to market. When the FDA withheld approval of Erbitux, the charming scientist who had always stayed just one step ahead of bankruptcy panicked and desperately tried to cash in his stock before the bad news hit Wall Street. Waksal is now in jail, the first of the Enron-era white-collar criminals to be sentenced. Yet his cancer drug has proved more durable than his evanescent profits. Erbitux remains promising, the leading example of a new way to fight cancer, and patients and investors hope it will be available soon.
- GenresNonfictionScience
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 20, 2004
10 people are currently reading
61 people want to read
About the author
Alex Prud’homme
13 books53 followersAlex Prud’homme is an American journalist and the author of several non-fiction books.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 13, 2016
This book is more like a biography of Imclone's co-founder Sam Waksal, a very charismatic person. It describes his personal life with great details. The author portrayed Sam Waksal as a habitual liar, someone who is hungry for money and luxurious living, who could easily attract people and used to get what he wanted (of course, until 2003, when he went to prison for insider trading and related charges).
Sam Waksal had been running Imclone for almost 20 years. The fact that he managed to keep the company alive for so long without having a single product does indicate that he did has an extraordinary qualities. People thought he was a great scientist with great social skills. In late 2001, Imclone made headline news in USA by revealing its $2 billion deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb to develop and commercialize cancer drug erbitux (EGF-R antagonist). It was the largest deal in biotech world at that time. However, within next 2 years, almost all of the Imclone's top executives were either in prison or no longer with the company.
What happened? Imclone's story is a classical example of corporate illusion. After reading this book it becomes clear how easy it is to manipulate people and data. Imclone's story reminds us about the disconnect between making science and making money.
posted by David Usharauli
http://bookidealist.blogspot.com/2015...
Sam Waksal had been running Imclone for almost 20 years. The fact that he managed to keep the company alive for so long without having a single product does indicate that he did has an extraordinary qualities. People thought he was a great scientist with great social skills. In late 2001, Imclone made headline news in USA by revealing its $2 billion deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb to develop and commercialize cancer drug erbitux (EGF-R antagonist). It was the largest deal in biotech world at that time. However, within next 2 years, almost all of the Imclone's top executives were either in prison or no longer with the company.
What happened? Imclone's story is a classical example of corporate illusion. After reading this book it becomes clear how easy it is to manipulate people and data. Imclone's story reminds us about the disconnect between making science and making money.
posted by David Usharauli
http://bookidealist.blogspot.com/2015...
August 25, 2019
Compelling tale about greed and how the system works
This is about the Cancer Game, which might be seen as a part of the Cancer Industry, a kind of bizarre and ghoulish phenomenon of modern times that exists precisely because there is no cure for cancer. Indeed, Alex Prud'homme, who is a gifted researcher and prose stylist, whose work has appeared in such prestigious journals as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, etc., might very well have called his book "The Cancer Game." I wonder why he didn't. Would such a title have offended those who play the game?
It is specifically about the rise and fall of one Sam Waksal, oldest son of Jewish emigrants and Holocaust survivors, a man of irresistible charm, fabulous energy, and great intelligence, a man driven to success and the high life, a man who had bounced around academia without much success until in the 1980s he saw an opportunity to become a player in the cancer game, and, along with his younger brother Harlan, founded ImClone Systems, Inc.
It is also about an anticancer drug called Erbitux, originally known as C225 because it was the 225th drug tested by its discoverers, John Mendelsohn and Gordon Sato in 1980. It showed promise because in tests it stopped the growth of tumors in mice.
And finally it is a story about how drugs get discovered, how they are developed, and especially how they get approved (or not) by the Food and Drug Administration. And of course it is about the Byzantine and incestuous relationship that exists between that August government agency and the massive pharmaceutical industry.
The curious thing about all this is that Imclone never turned a profit, Erbitux never came to market, and most of the people associated with Waksal and ImClone either made out like bandits or got stuck holding the bag. The drug itself, which works against cancer tumors, particularly colon cancer, by cutting off the blood supply to the tumors (an "antiangiogenesis" drug), was touted as a miracle that would save the lives of innumerable patients and make possibly billions of dollars for ImClone.
At least this was the hype delivered by Sam Waksal, and bought hook, line and sinker by pharma giant Bristol-Myers Squibb, and by desperate cancer patients as well as salivating Wall Street investors who jumped on the bandwagon as ImClone's stock rocketed skyward. Because of the promise of the drug, Waksal himself was able to live his dream life as a New York socialite, throwing lavish parties for celebs (including Martha Stewart while he dated her daughter), collecting fine art, popping open $600 bottles of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild while secretly selling stock on the side, sending the proceeds overseas, buying expensive apartments and houses for himself, etc., etc.
But the cold hard facts of Erbitux, like those of almost any cancer drug one can name, are very far from the hype. As Prud'homme notes on pages 332-333, "these agents...[Erbitux and others like Avastin and Iressa] are remarkable scientific advances, [but] they still only benefit some 10 to 20 percent of patients, and they only extend patients' lives by a matter of months."
That's it. That's the bottom line. And yet these drugs are so valuable that the companies that end up selling them can make hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars.
Waksal apparently came to this understanding sometime during the early eighties. He realized first the simple fact that the way the cancer industry works is doctors have to prescribe something rather than nothing. Then he realized that living a few months longer can mean a lot to people. Therefore any FDA-approved cancer drug will automatically fill a need. What this means is that the PROMISE of a cancer drug, if cleverly promoted, will spark a rally in the shares of the company that owns the patent. If, like Sam Waksal, you own millions of those shares, you can get rich on mere promise alone.
Furthermore, should the drug have any real value at all, and be approved (or even look like it's going to be approved) by the FDA, you might be able to get some pharmaceutical giant like Bristol-Myers Squibb to front a whole lot of money on that promise since they are desperate to find a cancer drug to replace those that have gone generic.
This works because even drugs with very limited effectiveness are better than no drug at all. This is true for many patients, for many doctors, and is especially true for the big pharmaceutical companies.
Note that these drugs are valuable because the people who need them are typically people of relative means who can afford to pay large sums of money for them, either through their HMOs, their government, or their own funds. In contrast a drug that would prolong the life of poor people in third world countries would be of only marginal value to the big pharmaceutical companies.
I should also mention that Prud'homme spends some serious ink in this book on Waksal's long-time friend Martha Stewart and her troubles. Her personality, her empire, and the way she handles herself are vividly detailed. In fact, some readers might find her story the most interesting part of the book.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
This is about the Cancer Game, which might be seen as a part of the Cancer Industry, a kind of bizarre and ghoulish phenomenon of modern times that exists precisely because there is no cure for cancer. Indeed, Alex Prud'homme, who is a gifted researcher and prose stylist, whose work has appeared in such prestigious journals as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, etc., might very well have called his book "The Cancer Game." I wonder why he didn't. Would such a title have offended those who play the game?
It is specifically about the rise and fall of one Sam Waksal, oldest son of Jewish emigrants and Holocaust survivors, a man of irresistible charm, fabulous energy, and great intelligence, a man driven to success and the high life, a man who had bounced around academia without much success until in the 1980s he saw an opportunity to become a player in the cancer game, and, along with his younger brother Harlan, founded ImClone Systems, Inc.
It is also about an anticancer drug called Erbitux, originally known as C225 because it was the 225th drug tested by its discoverers, John Mendelsohn and Gordon Sato in 1980. It showed promise because in tests it stopped the growth of tumors in mice.
And finally it is a story about how drugs get discovered, how they are developed, and especially how they get approved (or not) by the Food and Drug Administration. And of course it is about the Byzantine and incestuous relationship that exists between that August government agency and the massive pharmaceutical industry.
The curious thing about all this is that Imclone never turned a profit, Erbitux never came to market, and most of the people associated with Waksal and ImClone either made out like bandits or got stuck holding the bag. The drug itself, which works against cancer tumors, particularly colon cancer, by cutting off the blood supply to the tumors (an "antiangiogenesis" drug), was touted as a miracle that would save the lives of innumerable patients and make possibly billions of dollars for ImClone.
At least this was the hype delivered by Sam Waksal, and bought hook, line and sinker by pharma giant Bristol-Myers Squibb, and by desperate cancer patients as well as salivating Wall Street investors who jumped on the bandwagon as ImClone's stock rocketed skyward. Because of the promise of the drug, Waksal himself was able to live his dream life as a New York socialite, throwing lavish parties for celebs (including Martha Stewart while he dated her daughter), collecting fine art, popping open $600 bottles of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild while secretly selling stock on the side, sending the proceeds overseas, buying expensive apartments and houses for himself, etc., etc.
But the cold hard facts of Erbitux, like those of almost any cancer drug one can name, are very far from the hype. As Prud'homme notes on pages 332-333, "these agents...[Erbitux and others like Avastin and Iressa] are remarkable scientific advances, [but] they still only benefit some 10 to 20 percent of patients, and they only extend patients' lives by a matter of months."
That's it. That's the bottom line. And yet these drugs are so valuable that the companies that end up selling them can make hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars.
Waksal apparently came to this understanding sometime during the early eighties. He realized first the simple fact that the way the cancer industry works is doctors have to prescribe something rather than nothing. Then he realized that living a few months longer can mean a lot to people. Therefore any FDA-approved cancer drug will automatically fill a need. What this means is that the PROMISE of a cancer drug, if cleverly promoted, will spark a rally in the shares of the company that owns the patent. If, like Sam Waksal, you own millions of those shares, you can get rich on mere promise alone.
Furthermore, should the drug have any real value at all, and be approved (or even look like it's going to be approved) by the FDA, you might be able to get some pharmaceutical giant like Bristol-Myers Squibb to front a whole lot of money on that promise since they are desperate to find a cancer drug to replace those that have gone generic.
This works because even drugs with very limited effectiveness are better than no drug at all. This is true for many patients, for many doctors, and is especially true for the big pharmaceutical companies.
Note that these drugs are valuable because the people who need them are typically people of relative means who can afford to pay large sums of money for them, either through their HMOs, their government, or their own funds. In contrast a drug that would prolong the life of poor people in third world countries would be of only marginal value to the big pharmaceutical companies.
I should also mention that Prud'homme spends some serious ink in this book on Waksal's long-time friend Martha Stewart and her troubles. Her personality, her empire, and the way she handles herself are vividly detailed. In fact, some readers might find her story the most interesting part of the book.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
October 22, 2024
Very well written and detailed about the biotech firm ImClone. The biotech industry is so important to the world but unfortunately, greed takes precedence over what’s most important. I would have liked the author to conclude Martha Stewart’s story in the same way as others mentioned in the book. I enjoyed it though.
May 10, 2020
Great book to understand the biotech boom.
February 19, 2017
A fascinating book. I was concerned that not traditionally having a great understanding of science, the terminology would leave me in the dark, however, the explanations we're made quite well, and I learned a lot not only about biogenics, but also about the FDA, and it's origins. And I also learned about players like Dr John Mendelsohn, who was hapless enough to be on the board of not one but two companies that we're scandal ridden (Imclone and Enron)
Two things which detracted from the book (1) The author said he threw the book together in a short amount of time, and sometimes that shows. He inserted himself into the book (I talked to Sam...) at different times, particularly later in the book, which seemed to contradict the 95% of the book where he didn't. (2) more often, we heard the bad about Sam Waksal-he was a greedy and he lied to the Government, shareholders, etc. But his friends stuck by him to the very end. I have to think there was some good about him that wasn't told.
Otherwise a great read. (less)
Two things which detracted from the book (1) The author said he threw the book together in a short amount of time, and sometimes that shows. He inserted himself into the book (I talked to Sam...) at different times, particularly later in the book, which seemed to contradict the 95% of the book where he didn't. (2) more often, we heard the bad about Sam Waksal-he was a greedy and he lied to the Government, shareholders, etc. But his friends stuck by him to the very end. I have to think there was some good about him that wasn't told.
Otherwise a great read. (less)
November 7, 2011
First off, I found this very well written. It is rather long, but I was captivated the entire time. I would have given it more stars except that it is already a bit dated. I was hanging on every word and the book ended before the story did. It left me feeling a bit jaded. It was a good read and I do like the author's style in this book, but I am hesitant to recommend this book because the ending wasn't the end.
February 13, 2016
Not really my type of book. But I trudged my way through and finally finished it. Interesting but a little too heavy in technicalities.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews