An Iranian immigrant becomes a billionaire as her biotech firm’s stock soars

In the ultra-competitive world of cancer drugs, Summit Therapeutics is a relative underdog. The 21-year-old biotech company has just 130 employees, no revenue and no approved drugs. But in the past two weeks, its market cap has exploded on positive news about its most promising drug candidate.

Shares of Nasdaq-listed Summit Therapeutics have nearly doubled since Sept. 6, lifting the company’s market capitalization to $17 billion. (The stock peaked at $31.93 on September 13 and fell to $23.16 as of September 19.) That, in turn, led its co-CEO Maky Zanganeh to have a sub 5% share plus lots of options, a new billionaire – worth about $1.1 billion. She is one of 34 self-made American billionaires and one of only three American women to make a billion-dollar fortune in the healthcare industry. The other two: Bio-Rad Laboratories co-founder Alice Schwartz and United Therapeutics founder Martine Rothblatt.

Summit’s other co-CEO, Robert (“Bob”) Duggan, joined Forbes’ The billionaire made his fortune in 2013 on the back of the success of Pharmacyclics, a struggling drug development company, which he turned around — with the help of Zanganeh, who served as chief operating officer. Duggan, who owns 75 percent of Summit (he recently spent $75 million to increase his stake), is now worth an estimated $14.9 billion.

The latest rally in Summit stock began on Monday, Sept. 9, the day after data from a recent study was presented at the World Lung Cancer Conference in San Diego. The study showed that in non-small-cell lung cancer (the most common type of lung cancer), Summit’s experimental therapy, ivonescimab, outperformed Merck’s Keytruda — a blockbuster drug that generated sales of 25 billion dollars last year, making it worldwide. the best selling drug.

“The big news was that we could beat Keytruda,” Zanganeh says.

The study showed a 49% reduced risk of tumor progression with Summit’s ivonescimab compared to Keytruda. Patients taking ivonescimab took 11.4 months before their tumors grew back, compared with 5.8 months for patients taking Keytruda.

Summit Therapeutics licensed ivonescimab from Hong Kong-listed Akeso in December 2022 for $500 million upfront and another $4.5 billion if certain milestones are met. Summit has the right to market the drug in the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Akeso co-founder, CEO and president Xia Yu, who is also Michelle Xia, serves on the board of directors of Summit Therapeutics.

The data presented on September 8 was based on a study conducted in China. For the US Food and Drug Administration to approve ivonescimab, Summit Therapeutics will conduct a global phase 3 study, a process that could take 18 months or more. Analysts at investment banking firm Stifel project no revenue for Summit until 2025.

Zanganeh, who is 54, took an unusual path to becoming a biotech CEO. She was born in Tehran, Iran, the youngest of three girls, to architect parents, and was eight years old when the Shah was overthrown in early 1979. The following year, the Iran-Iraq War began. “We had to constantly face the fear of bombing,” she wrote in her 2021 memoir, The Magic of the Normal. “We never knew if the bombs would hit our house or not.” When she was about 11 years old, a friend of her father’s in Germany helped her get German visas for the family so they could leave Iran. The difficulty was getting a flight from Tehran as the airports were often closed. Zanganeh and her parents ended up flying to Germany via Austria, she recounts in her memoir. They lived in Oldenburg, a small town in northern Germany near Hamburg, and she learned German. Her parents ended up returning to Iran, but Zanganeh stayed in Germany for high school, first living with a friend and then an uncle.

Both sisters ended up in medical school in Strasbourg, France, so Zanganeh’s father encouraged her to attend university there as well, which meant she had to learn French. She studied dentistry at the University of Strasbourg, with a focus on pediatric dentistry, and graduated in 1995, but she wasn’t sure she wanted a career as a dentist. In 1997, an Iranian friend was working in Europe for the American robotic surgery company Computer Motion, whose CEO was Bob Duggan. Zanganeh became fascinated with the work and took a job as Europe coordinator for the company – while also earning an MBA from Schiller University, a US school with a program in Strasbourg. She was eventually promoted to Computer Motion’s head of Europe and the Middle East and then, in 2002, global vice president of training and education, leading to a move to the headquarters in Santa Barbara, California. The following year, competitor Intuitive Surgical acquired Computer Motion, and Zanganeh left the company.

She ended up working with Duggan at his investment firm, Robert Duggan & Associates, as vice president of business development, leading to their next chapter. Looking for investment, they landed on small publicly traded drug developer Pharmacyclics, investing for the first time in 2004. The company struggled to get a drug approved, and Duggan took over in 2008 after the board resigned. Zanganeh became vice president of business development that year, and in 2012, chief operating officer. Pharmacists had success with a drug called Imbruvica, which was approved to treat a blood cancer, chronic lymphocytic leukemia. In 2015, AbbVie bought Pharmacyclics for $21 billion in cash and stock.

In 2020, Duggan purchased over 60% of Summit Therapeutics for $63 million and became CEO. Zanganeh, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020 and has since recovered, joined Summit’s board in late 2020 and became co-CEO in September 2022 — months before signing on agreement with Akeso.

Zanganeh and Duggan have high hopes for the ivonescimabul at Summit. There are 20 ongoing clinical trials in China with the drug candidate, including for triple-negative breast cancer, colorectal cancer and head and neck cancer. “The probability of success is very high,” says Duggan. “That’s usually not the case in biotech.”