better biology, especially in the realm of antivirals. “Roger and J.T. came over to talk to me and said, ‘Don’taccept. You can’t accept. You’ve got to talk to Vicki,’ ” Kwong recalls. “I’m like, ‘ Who is Vicki?’ ”
Kwong took the train up to Boston to give a talk at Vertex. The small lecture hall was packed: standing room only. Afterward, Thomson, Murcko, Tung, and several project leaders took her to lunch. She explained why she was leaving her job. “I wanted to do structure-based drug design, work on a team, but the way it was set up was, once the biochemistry group came in, we weren’t allowed to talk to each other. I mean, forget that,” she recalls. “All the guys were just laughing, falling out of their chairs, dying. They were like, ‘This is exactly why we left pharma.’
“At Schering, when Vertex published the structure of HCV protease, the head of research went completely bananas—the fact that Vertex could do this, and we had this huge team, and we hadn’t done it. At Big Pharma, when you had something like this that was very important, every month or so the VPs would send something down. From the PowerPoints sent up, the PowerPoints would come down, and your direction would be changing, which I think is ridiculous. So I heard Vertex had these project teams, and the people from the different functions ran the projects, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, right .’ But I was really hoping that that was the case. And it was the case.”
Kwong was dazzled, but kept her impressions to herself. The problem of designing an HCV protease inhibitor, from a research standpoint, was that there was no clear path. There was nothing to work with, no reagents. No one could grow the virus. There were no cell-based assays to tell you if your compounds were active. That meant, in managerial terms, no clear metrics, no way to measure progress, which in turn meant that the scientists would need to have time and space to figure out novel approaches—time to fail, over and over. And yet Sato didn’t seem to want to wait for Rice’s group or another academic lab or another company to come up with the tools that Vertex would need to advance drug discovery. She seemed fully committed.
There was no sag in enthusiasm at Vertex about hepatitis C as there was with other less stimulating projects: HCV fired the collective imagination. It was a priority. But at Vertex, speed was the creed, and the project was turning into a costly slog, one that drained money and scientistsfrom other research. With or without middle management, pressure on the team to perform was ratcheting up. Kwong thought piled-up failure was the one true metric of innovation, but coming up empty month after month had strained the organization. Within the terms of Boger’s social experiment, that left it to the team leaders to build their strongest case, preferably with data, although now the company’s purpose and identity seemed also to be on the line.
“We were living quarter to quarter: ‘Should we kill this project? Should we not kill this project?’ ” Sato recalls. “By now, it was several standard deviations outside of the time that Vertex prided itself on taking to get to a drug candidate. Plus, the clock was ticking on the market. So every quarterly planning meeting it was up for killing, because no one was paying the bill yet. Finally, John just gave one of his inimitable presentations on why we can’t give up now: that this was a project that was made for Vertex, and if Vertex can’t solve it, nobody can solve it, and we should all just work harder.”
It was Sato—her scientific credibility, organizational élan, skill at managing tension, and spirited enjoyment of the whirling loop-the-loop of entrepreneurial science—who took the results of Boger’s social experiment and tried to shape them into a successful discovery engine as Vertex added new projects and disciplines. A granddaughter of Japanese immigrants and
Kwong took the train up to Boston to give a talk at Vertex. The small lecture hall was packed: standing room only. Afterward, Thomson, Murcko, Tung, and several project leaders took her to lunch. She explained why she was leaving her job. “I wanted to do structure-based drug design, work on a team, but the way it was set up was, once the biochemistry group came in, we weren’t allowed to talk to each other. I mean, forget that,” she recalls. “All the guys were just laughing, falling out of their chairs, dying. They were like, ‘This is exactly why we left pharma.’
“At Schering, when Vertex published the structure of HCV protease, the head of research went completely bananas—the fact that Vertex could do this, and we had this huge team, and we hadn’t done it. At Big Pharma, when you had something like this that was very important, every month or so the VPs would send something down. From the PowerPoints sent up, the PowerPoints would come down, and your direction would be changing, which I think is ridiculous. So I heard Vertex had these project teams, and the people from the different functions ran the projects, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, right .’ But I was really hoping that that was the case. And it was the case.”
Kwong was dazzled, but kept her impressions to herself. The problem of designing an HCV protease inhibitor, from a research standpoint, was that there was no clear path. There was nothing to work with, no reagents. No one could grow the virus. There were no cell-based assays to tell you if your compounds were active. That meant, in managerial terms, no clear metrics, no way to measure progress, which in turn meant that the scientists would need to have time and space to figure out novel approaches—time to fail, over and over. And yet Sato didn’t seem to want to wait for Rice’s group or another academic lab or another company to come up with the tools that Vertex would need to advance drug discovery. She seemed fully committed.
There was no sag in enthusiasm at Vertex about hepatitis C as there was with other less stimulating projects: HCV fired the collective imagination. It was a priority. But at Vertex, speed was the creed, and the project was turning into a costly slog, one that drained money and scientistsfrom other research. With or without middle management, pressure on the team to perform was ratcheting up. Kwong thought piled-up failure was the one true metric of innovation, but coming up empty month after month had strained the organization. Within the terms of Boger’s social experiment, that left it to the team leaders to build their strongest case, preferably with data, although now the company’s purpose and identity seemed also to be on the line.
“We were living quarter to quarter: ‘Should we kill this project? Should we not kill this project?’ ” Sato recalls. “By now, it was several standard deviations outside of the time that Vertex prided itself on taking to get to a drug candidate. Plus, the clock was ticking on the market. So every quarterly planning meeting it was up for killing, because no one was paying the bill yet. Finally, John just gave one of his inimitable presentations on why we can’t give up now: that this was a project that was made for Vertex, and if Vertex can’t solve it, nobody can solve it, and we should all just work harder.”
It was Sato—her scientific credibility, organizational élan, skill at managing tension, and spirited enjoyment of the whirling loop-the-loop of entrepreneurial science—who took the results of Boger’s social experiment and tried to shape them into a successful discovery engine as Vertex added new projects and disciplines. A granddaughter of Japanese immigrants and
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