American Medicine God: Starting by Inheriting a Pharmaceutical Company and Selling Medicine

Spring has passed and summer has arrived, with heatwaves sweeping across the entire east coast.

The asphalt road sizzled under the sun, but inside the newly built research and development center of Water Pharmaceuticals, the temperature-controlled air conditioning kept the room at a cool and pleasant 22 degrees Celsius.

This used to be a workshop for making purple water.

Today, those syrup-covered reaction vessels have been dismantled and replaced with German-imported tablet presses, high-speed centrifuges, and tomographic imaging systems.

Victor Corleone stood in front of a huge whiteboard.

The whiteboard was densely covered with chemical formulas, dates, and red arrows. And at the center of it all, written in bold black marker, was a single word:

VALIUM (Valium/Diazepam)

"Gentlemen," Victor turned around, tapping the word with his marker, "this is our prey."

Sitting opposite him were six men in white coats.

They were "leftovers" that Victor poached from major pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Pfizer. There was a genius chemist who was fired for alcoholism, a pharmacology PhD who was relegated to a warehouse for offending his boss, and a tech geek who had been struggling at the bottom of the industry and was frustrated with his career.

At this moment, they were looking at the young boss with eyes that were a mixture of suspicion and expectation.

"Roche's cash cow," a bald doctor named Walter pushed up his glasses, "the world's best-selling sedative. Annual sales exceed one billion dollars. As far as I know, Mr. Corleone, its patent expires in less than six months."

“That means,” another researcher chimed in, “that any factory with a tablet press will be able to produce it. Dozens of generic versions will appear on the market, selling for only two dollars a bottle. Prices will plummet by 90%. It’s a red ocean, boss. If we go in now, we won’t even get a taste of the profits.”

"That's right." Victor smiled.

He picked up a red pen and drew a deep, abyss-like curve under that word.

"This is the 'patent cliff'," Victor's voice echoed in the empty laboratory. "The moment a blockbuster drug loses its patent protection is like a school of piranhas rushing into a school of tuna. The original drug manufacturer's profits will collapse like a free fall."

He paused for a moment, his gaze sweeping across everyone's face.

"But what if we don't jump? What if we build a bridge?"

Victor turned around and drew a complex structural diagram on the other side of the whiteboard.

That was a cross-sectional view of the microstructure. At the core was a drug crystal, surrounded by layers upon layers of polymer films, like a tiny onion.

"What is this?" The bald doctor stood up, his eyes fixed on the image. "Microencapsulation?"

"To be precise, it's a multilayered pulsed controlled-release microcapsule," Victor put forward this concept, which still belongs to the realm of science fiction in this era.

"Listen, regular tranquilizers have a fatal weakness: the peak-and-trough effect. After a patient takes it, the blood concentration spikes half an hour later, and the person becomes drowsy as if they've been hit by a sledgehammer; four hours later, the concentration drops sharply, and the anxiety rebounds, forcing them to take a second pill. This fluctuating experience is the root of addiction."

Victor's fingers traced the "onion" structure: "But what if we could release the drug evenly in the gastrointestinal tract like an hourglass? The first membrane dissolves in stomach acid, releasing 30% of the dose to induce sleep quickly; the second membrane dissolves in the small intestine to maintain deep sleep; and the third membrane slowly permeates in the large intestine, ensuring no hangover when you wake up the next day."

"This is impossible..." the bald doctor muttered to himself. "This requires extremely high-precision fluidized bed coating technology. And the polymer ratio..."

"The ratio is in my head," Victor pointed to his temple. "I've calculated the perfect ratio of ethyl cellulose and Eudragit resin. It can keep blood drug concentration fluctuations within 5%. What does that mean? It means we're not selling 'sedatives,' we're selling 'perfect sleep.'"

You could hear a pin drop in the laboratory.

These tech geeks began to realize that the young man standing before them was more than just a wealthy boss. His understanding of pharmacology even surpassed that of professors in their ivory towers.

“But…” Saul Goodman, who had been standing in the corner, spoke up. He didn’t understand chemistry, but he understood law. “Boss, this sounds cool. But it’s still tranquilizers, right? The chemical composition hasn’t changed. How do we stop others from doing this?”

"Good question, Thor." Victor snapped his fingers. "That's called Evergreening."

He wrote the word on the whiteboard.

"Although the molecular formula patent for diazepam has expired, the 'microencapsulated controlled-release formulation' is a completely new patent. As long as we register this patent before Roche, we will have a new 20-year exclusivity period. We can then loudly proclaim that ordinary diazepam is outdated, side-effect-laden 'old-fashioned junk,' while VOT Pharmaceuticals' 'Valium CR' is the standard of the future."

"Saul, I want you to go to the patent office first thing tomorrow morning. The scope of the patent application should be as broad as possible—not only the formula, but also the manufacturing process of this 'onion structure.' I want to block that path and make those Roche lawyers cry when they see our patent."

Thor's eyes lit up.

"No problem, boss." Thor grinned.

Victor looked at the group of eager researchers.

"Gentlemen, we are not manufacturing generic drugs. We are reinventing drugs. Now, I have the complete set of process parameters, and you have the most advanced equipment in the United States. I want you to turn this blueprint into a physical product within a month."

"Is it possible?"

"Yes!" the bald doctor shouted first. "If the formula is correct, I can make a sample tonight!"

……

late at night.

The laboratory lights were still on.

Victor stood alone in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, looking down at New Jersey in the darkness.

He was holding a capsule that had just been prototyped.

It was a translucent capsule containing countless tiny, pale blue pellets. Under the light, they resembled miniature sapphires, sparkling and translucent, radiating a captivating luster.

That's the beauty of technology.

This is the magic of capital.

The capsule costs less than 5 cents to produce, but he plans to price it at $2. Moreover, insurance companies will be scrambling to buy it, and doctors will be eager to prescribe it, because it can be claimed to be "safer and longer-lasting."

"Is this the long-term money you wanted?"

A voice sounded behind him.

It was Rossi. He'd arrived at some point. He was now a compliance consultant for Vought Pharmaceuticals, but he seemed more like a ghost.

"This is just the beginning, David." Victor held up the capsule, looking through it at the city lights. "Do you know what the greatest allure of this pill is?"

"The therapeutic effect?" Rossi asked.

“No,” Victor laughed, “it’s ‘exclusivity.’ Once patients get used to this steady effect, they can no longer tolerate the side effects of regular pills. We not only manufacture drugs, we manufacture demand, we manufacture dependence, we manufacture standards.”

Rossi watched the young man's retreating figure and felt a deep chill.

He suddenly realized that Victor, who had previously produced purple water and had murky ties with the mafia, wasn't actually that scary. What was scary was the capitalist standing before him, cloaked in the guise of a scientist, building a business empire using patent law and chemical bonds.

The former just wants your life.

The latter wants everything about you.

"Roche won't stand idly by," Rossi warned. "Their legal team is among the best in the country. Once they discover we're poaching their employees..."

"Let them come." Victor gripped the capsule tightly in his hand. "Before they even realize what's happening, we've already got the approval through Paper NDA. By the time they want to sue, we'll have enough cash flow to keep them entertained until the next century."

"Go prepare the Paper NDA documents, David. We need to send the FDA a gift they can't refuse."

Outside the window, a bolt of lightning ripped through the night sky, illuminating the word "VALIUM" on the whiteboard.

In that instant, the word seemed to transform into a giant dollar sign $.