Last month, word spread that a drug was finally shown to slow Alzheimer’s disease, and overnight a 73-year-old Swedish professor made $350 million.
The lucky man, Lars Lannfelt, was not particularly famous. He had done pioneering work on the disease, but it was in the 90s and belonged to a sub-field that, after a litany of failures and one disastrous approval, had fallen from grace.
Indeed, most scientists and executives at Biogen and Eisai, the two massive companies that will sell the new drug lecanemab if approved, probably didn’t know the name of the man who invented it in a Swedish lab 17 years ago.
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