John C. Martin, who became a billionaire by developing and commercializing a single-dose daily pill that turned HIV into a manageable disease and popularized another drug to cure hepatitis C, died on March 30th in Palo Alto, California . He was 69 years old.
His death in a hospital was confirmed by Gilead Sciences in Foster City, California, where he served as executive director from 1996 to 2016 and chairman of the board from 2016 until his retirement two years later. The cause was head injuries he sustained the day before when he fell on a sidewalk while walking home in Old Palo Alto, according to the Santa Clara County medical examiner.
Dr. Martin, a chemist who rose from director of research to chief executive officer of Gilead in six years, turned a struggling pharmaceutical company of 35 employees into a $ 100 billion company based in Foster City, California, with approximately 12,000 employees.
Gilead shook the industry with several major scientific breakthroughs, starting with the development of the first anti-influenza pill, Tamiflu, which the company licensed to Swiss drug maker Hoffman-La Roche in 1996 to market Sovaldi, which allegedly 90 percent of patients use this liver virus heals.
Gilead’s work on HIV began to bear fruit in 2004 when his Truvada was approved as a treatment for the virus. The drug received approval in 2012 as a means of preventing HIV infection.
The company’s biggest advancement in HIV was in 2006 with Atripla, which combined Truvada with Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Sustiva in a single pill, which results in the replacement of up to 32 different drugs that some patients took daily to treat the virus can cause AIDS.
Treatment with a pill should be more than a convenience. By making self-medication easier for patients, they were more likely to take prescribed full doses, reducing the risk of them becoming breeding grounds for drug-resistant strains of the disease.
During the tenure of Dr. Martin Gilead also created remdesivir in 2009, which proved ineffective in its original mission to treat hepatitis C and other viruses, but emerged as a therapeutic weapon during the Covid-19 pandemic.
While the company’s annual sales surged over $ 20 billion and its products were hailed as medical miracles, the Department of Health and Human Services successfully claimed Gilead violated government patents in the manufacture of Truvada. The company also drew fire from state and federal regulators over the prices it was charging – $ 1,000 a month for Sustiva and $ 1,000 for each hepatitis pill.
Dr. Martin defended Gilead in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in 2017. Among other things, he argued that high prices for successful products are necessary to subsidize future research.
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The company’s defense lawyers also pointed out that Gilead has donated medicines in some cases and has worked with local manufacturers in developing countries to make scaled-down generic versions of some treatments for HIV and hepatitis C.
“John’s legacy,” said Daniel O’Day, the company’s chief executive officer, “will be felt for generations to come and from the scientific advances under his leadership and the programs he has advocated for access to medicines to expand, to live on. ” People all over the world. “
John Charles Martin was born in Easton, Pennsylvania on May 7, 1951, to Tellis Alexander Martin, a chemist for Bristol-Myers, and Janet (Sacks) Martin, who taught chemistry, physics, and computer literacy at a prep school in Indiana.
Mr. Martin earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University where he met Rosemary Carella at a party. They married in 1977 and each earned a master’s degree (in business administration and marketing) from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. He later received a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago.
After working at Syntex Corporation, another pharmaceutical company, Mr. Martin was Director of Antiviral Chemistry at Bristol-Myers Squibb from 1978 to 1984 before joining Gilead in 1990.
As managing directors, he and John Milligan, who was to succeed him, completed the 2012 acquisition of Pharmasset, an antiviral drug developer, valued at $ 11 billion. In addition to Gilead, Dr. Martin President of the International Society for Antiviral Research from 1998 to 2000.
His marriage to Mrs. Martin ended in divorce. His survivors include their son and daughter, his three siblings, and partner Lillian Lien-Li Lou, who was recently listed on a file as the treasury of the John C. Martin Foundation, whose stated mission is to improve health care for medical underserved populations.
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