48 | FORBES ASIA OCTOBER 2017
but still serves on Incyte’s board. “They wanted to find a new
venue to work.” Swamy Yeleswaram, one of Incyte’s research-
ers, remembers getting the call. Friedman opened with: “So,
Swamy, are you coming to Incyte?” Yeleswaram recalls that
Friedman was annoyed that he didn’t immediately say yes.
Much of Incyte’s core team, including current chief scientist
Reid Huber and key inventors of all of Incyte’s drugs, were re-
cruited from DuPont.
Incyte’s gene database was supposed to help this team in-
vent new drugs. It didn’t work out that way. But one gene pat-
ent (which later turned out to be invalid) did point them in
the right direction, toward a protein involved in the immune
system called Janus kinase 2 (JAK 2 ). Initially they hoped a
drug targeting it would be effective against the blood cancer
multiple myeloma.
In 2005 , as Incyte was preparing the drug for clinical tri-
als, three papers were published, in Nature, Blood and the
New England Journal of Medicine, showing that mutations in
the gene for JAK 2 were a central cause in both myelofibro-
sis and a related disorder, polycythemia vera, which causes a
thickening of the blood. Within a day, the team had changed
their plans, deciding to explore the efficacy of their new drug
on these diseases.
Then came another speed bump. There were issues with
both the side-effect profile and the intellectual property sur-
rounding Incyte’s original JAK 2 inhibitor. Friedman gave his
team a week to come up with an alternative, and they used
another JAK 2 drug they’d originally planned to develop as a
topical cream. By 2 007, the drug was in clinical trials. In 2 010,
results published in NEJM showed half the patients who took
the drug saw their spleen volume reduced by 5 0%. The FDA
demanded more data that proved patients felt better, too. The
drug, now named Jakafi, was approved in November 2 011. In
its first full year it generated $ 136 million in sales.
Friedman decided to step down when the drug hit the mar-
ket. (Incyte’s main building in Delaware is now named after
him.) Hoppenot, who grew up in Champagne, France, and rose
through the ranks at French pharma Rhône-Poulenc Rorer, was
selected to replace him. At the time, he was the head of oncology
at the Swiss drug giant Novartis, which had snapped up the right
to sell Jakafi outside the U.S. Hoppenot says he couldn’t resist the
opportunity to build a company around this cancer drug.
In 2016 , Hoppenot purchased the European division of
Ariad Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts, including
the rights to another blood cancer drug, to build out a European
sales operation for Incyte’s future drugs. This past April, a rheu-
matoid arthritis drug Incyte had licensed to Eli Lilly was reject-
ed by the FDA; in a surprise to investors, Lilly said in August it
would be able to resubmit the drug by January 2018.
Many of investors’ hopes for Incyte are riding on a new
medicine, epacadostat, invented by Incyte’s in-house team. The
medicine is the brainchild of biologist Peggy Scherle, anoth-
er recruit from DuPont. She became fascinated by a chemical
pathway used by the developing fetus to protect itself from its
mother’s immune system. Tumors apparently hijack the path-
way to protect themselves. Incyte’s chemists tested 10,000 po-
tential drugs to find one that could hit Scherle’s
proposed target. Even then, it didn’t shrink tumor
cells in the lab; it merely kept them from growing.
But epacadostat seems to amplify the potency
of two drugs made by Bristol-Myers Squibb and
Merck: Opdivo ( 2016 sales: $3. 8 billion) and Key-
truda ( 2016 sales: $1. 4 billion), both of which re-
lease the immune system to attack tumors. In
clinical studies of the advanced form of the dead-
ly skin cancer melanoma, patients seem to be
more likely to see their tumors disappear with
a combination of epacadostat and one of these
drugs. A big Merck trial comparing the combina-
tion of Keytruda and epacadostat for melanoma
will be completed in the first half of 2018. Even
Roger Perlmutter, Merck’s head of R&D, is a lit-
tle nervous. He thinks the trial will be successful
but notes that no study has compared the com-
bination of Keytruda and epacadostat with Key-
truda and a placebo. “All the arguments now are
from single-arm data with historical reference,” he warns. “That
could turn out to be very wrong.”
Incyte’s executives note that the epacadostat results have been
consistent across studies in melanoma and lung cancer. If it does
work, it will make Incyte one of the lucky few companies selling
multiple blockbuster cancer drugs (see table), which fetch a high
price on the U.S. market. Hoppenot says that the U.S. system can
be “illogical and cruel,” forcing huge co-payments on patients for
the drugs most likely to save lives, but insists that his drugs will
be good for the health care system. He compares the revolution
in cancer to the one that happened with HIV two decades ago,
saying that drugs like the ones he has worked on at Incyte and
Novartis will cost a lot but will justify themselves by emptying
hospital wards. That would be a wonderful thing.COMPANY NUMBER 2016 MARKET TOTAL
OF DRUGS SALES CAP RETURN
APPROVED ($BIL) ($BIL) (%, 5-YEAR)
Celgene 5 $10.9 $111.1 273%
Regeneron 3 4.9 45.6 190
Vertex 3 1.7 38.7 165
Alexion 3 3.0 32.7 33
BioMarin 5 1.1 16.1 141
Tesaro 2 0.04 6.3 765
United Therapeutics 2 1.6 5.2 111The Two-Drug Club
IN THE 41-YEAR HISTORY OF THE BIOTECH INDUSTRY,
41 COMPANIES HAVE GOTTEN MORE THAN ONE DRUG
APPROVED. HERE ARE SOME SUCCESS STORIES.
SOURCES: INNOTHINK CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BIOMEDICAL INNOVATION; FACTSET SYSTEMS.FORBES ASIA
STRATEGIES
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