Fatal Reaction

Azor board members, a fried-chicken tycoon who owned a large block of Azor stock. If he had concerns about the deal he wasn’t the only one. The company was in the midst of nerve-racking—and for Azor, pivotal—negotiations with the Takisawa Corporation, a pharmaceutical company whose aging founder had parlayed the bestselling hangover remedy in Japan into a global empire. At stake was a promising new drug molecule called ZK-501, and with it much more of Azor Pharmaceuticals’ future than Stephen Azorini would care to admit.
    Derived from an obscure Brazilian tree fungus, ZK-501 was a spectacular trigger of a molecule, a hundred times more powerful than cortisone, the world’s most widely prescribed anti-inflammatory medication. Like cortisone, ZK-501 also produced side effects—unfortunately, some of ZK-501’s were deadly. Azor scientists were frantically working to eliminate the molecule’s undesirable properties. If they succeeded, the new drug would supplant cortisone and capture a market conservatively estimated at $15 billion a year—provided they got it to the market first.
    But Stephen was running out of money and he was running out of time. The ZK-501 project employed as many scientists as a small university and was hemorrhaging money at a terrifying rate. Raising the stakes further was the fact that Mikos Pharmaceuticals, the drug industry giant, was also working on the molecule with a rumored two hundred scientists assigned full time to the project.
    In order to help staunch the flow of dollars, Stephen and Danny had spent the better part of the fall trolling for a strategic partner, another company willing to make a much needed infusion of cash in exchange for a share of the profits from any eventual new drug. So far, the only nibble had come from Takisawa.
    “If Cassidy has concerns about the deal he should bring them up at the next board meeting,” I told Guttman. I hated these behind-the-scenes intrigues and resented Guttman’s eagerness to take part in them.
    “If Jim Cassidy brings this up with the board he’s going to start by demanding Stephen’s resignation,” announced Guttman.
    “Then he’s a fool,” I said flatly, hoping that Guttman wouldn’t see how shaken I was by this news. It didn’t matter that Azor Pharmaceuticals was now a publicly traded company; it was still Stephen’s child, the product of his vision—and his will.
    Most new scientific start-ups are biomedical companies—fledgling enterprises that compete with each other in small, untested markets. But Azor was a drug company and as such had been forced from day one to compete with the pharmaceutical superpowers and their well-established lines of billion-dollar drugs. That the company had survived its first year was impressive. That it had succeeded was nothing short of miraculous. Six years later, Azor may have outgrown its David role, but it still had a long way to go before becoming a Goliath.
    Recently the company seemed to be experiencing the growing pains of an awkward adolescent. The patents on its two most profitable drugs were due to expire in the coining year and its recently introduced antischizophrenia drug, Serezine, had so far generated more controversy than profits. Compounding matters, the company’s most promising new product, a blood substitute called Hemasyn, which Stephen had planned to introduce the previous spring, was still bogged down with the FDA. In ZK-501 Stephen believed lay the seeds of redemption.
    “Don’t try to tell me that the ZK-501 project hasn’t been a huge drain on the bottom line,” insisted Guttman. “You and I both know that the company can’t handle those kinds of losses for much longer.”
    “That’s why they’re lining up a strategic partner,” I reminded him.
    “And if the Japanese don’t bite?”
    “Stephen seems confident that they will. He and Danny were just in Japan and things seem to be moving ahead.”
    “Says who? Whenever anybody tries to get in touch with Danny he’s never there.”
    “He’s been having some health problems recently,” I ventured, hoping it would placate him.
    “Health problems. Head problems. It makes no difference. Stephen’s got too much on his plate and so far Danny, who’s supposed to be handling the negotiations with the Japanese, hasn’t done a damned thing except drop the ball.”
    “I will track Danny down to the ends of the earth as soon as you and I are finished, and I will have him return Cassidy’s