Introduction

120 DIRECTED RESEARCH
could never be manufactured in pill form. Erickson and Kempf knew
they were going to need a better drug, one that wouldn’t have to be injected
intravenously. But to come up with something better, they needed
to throw more chemists at the task. And to convince top management
that it was worth ramping up the program, they had to show that a protease
inhibitor—any protease inhibitor—would eventually be a viable
alternative to AZT as an AIDS drug. At that point, no protease inhibitor
had ever been successfully tested in humans.
Erickson again turned to the government for help. In the fall of 1990,
he set up a meeting between his Abbott team and every top official at
NIH involved in the fight against AIDS. Anthony Fauci, who had primary
responsibility as head of the National Institute for Allergies and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was there; so was Broder, chief of NCI;
Dan Hoth, head of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG); and Bruce
Chabner, who was heading the drug discovery unit at NCI. “Abbott
won’t develop this drug as an intravenous agent, but I need to know if it
will work,” Erickson told the small crowd. His plan was simple. He
wanted the government to subsidize the cost of testing the drug for its
pharmacological activity in animals. He also needed help in developing
it into a form that could be injected into humans. With those two steps
out of the way, he would then have the results needed to convince
Abbott’s top management to fund the scale-up and production of the
drug to do the initial testing in humans to prove the concept. “It would
save us all a lot of grief if the protease turns out not to be a very good target,”
he told them. 6
The government scientists were more than happy to perform the tests
for Abbott. From a scientific perspective, it was an extraordinary opportunity
to test the first of a new class of drugs that had been specifically
designed to combat AIDS. They also thought they had every right to be
part of the trials. Abbott’s protease inhibitor had been developed with
the help of federal grants. “We wanted to collaborate on clinical trials,”
Hoth said. “We thought they had good science and a promising drug.
Their research people were outstanding.” The result of the meeting was
an agreement to let NCI do the initial animal testing on Abbott’s new
drug. 7
Murad and Erickson were overjoyed. The agreement allowed them to
pursue their exciting discovery while maintaining the program’s low profile
inside the firm. But their glee would be short lived. A few months
after Schuler’s departure, the company’s board of directors, fed up with
Schoellhorn’s constant upheavals, stripped him of day-to-day responsi-