How a surfer who never finished college became a biotech billionaire
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. There’s a myth that making money in biotechnology stocks requires an advanced degree. But Robert Duggan, an avid surfer who never graduated college, has proven that notion wrong.
Twice. Duggan’s latest investment, Summit Therapeutics, has become one of the industry’s greatest bets in recent years. The stock is up more than 1,000% in the past 12 months thanks to data from a late-stage trial that showed that its drug, Ivonescimab, beat Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda in patients with a form of lung cancer.
Duggan, who was already a billionaire before the Summit investment, is now worth about $16 billion, according to Forbes data. There is much still to be worked out with the drug, which Summit licensed from Chinese biotech Akeso in 2022. For starters, investors are eager to see how it performs in global trials outside of China.
What is remarkable about Summit’s success so far, though, is that this isn’t even Duggan’s first time making billions in biotech. About 20 years ago, Duggan, a member of the Church of Scientology, began acquiring shares in a little-known biotech company called Pharmacyclics. He was drawn to the company’s cancer drug Xcytrin because of a personal loss: his son’s death from brain cancer.
Pharmacyclics ultimately dropped the development of Xcytrin after multiple setbacks but went on to develop leukemia blockbuster Imbruvica. In 2015, AbbVie paid $21 billion for the company. Because the odds are stacked heavily against you, it is mind-bogglingly hard to strike biotech gold once.
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