On the first day of trading the stock almost doubled, giving Axovant a market capitalization of nearly $3 billion. Considering that Ramaswamy had persuaded Glaxo to part with the unproven remedy for a mere $5 million up front, the newlyweds were ecstatic, as was a veritable wedding party of hedge fund pals who had followed Ramaswamy into the stock.
But this creeping fear ignores the full scope of what Ramaswamy is up to: rescuing the pharmaceutical industry’s forgotten drugs. Whether or not the Axovant drug works, the IPO, according to Ramaswamy, is just “a first step on a broader mission” to liberate abandoned or deprioritized drugs that routinely languish in the pipelines of pharma companies, never reaching patients or enriching investors.
Leaning on his Wall Street background and armed with a $400 million war chest, Ramaswamy is building a portfolio not of stocks but of has-been drugs that he grabs for “pennies on the dollar,” free-riding on the billions in research that pharma sometimes sinks into failed trials. Using a pharmaceutical holding company he formed last year, Roivant Sciences, Ramaswamy hopes to spin out dozens of companies, much as he did with Axovant. “This will be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry,” he boasts. “It will be a pipeline every bit as deep and diverse as the most promising pharma company in the world but with a capital efficiency that is unprecedented.”
A whirlwind of such deals has made Ramaswamy, a member of the FORBES 30 Under 30 list, biopharma’s youngest chief executive. He may soon be its youngest billionaire. FORBES estimates that Roivant is worth $3.5 billion, making its Millennial founder’s 20% or so stake worth some $700 million. Ramaswamy, who just turned 30, has bigger aspirations. Roivant, he says, will become the “Berkshire Hathaway of drug development.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathan...drug-companies-from-thin-air/?sh=a6ae9d54f392
