Richard Silverman, Akava Therapeutics founder and Northwestern professor

This time around, Lyri­ca's in­ven­tor is de­vel­op­ing his North­west­ern dis­cov­er­ies at his own biotech

Richard Sil­ver­man was left in the dark for the last five years of clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment of the drug he dis­cov­ered. The North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor found out about the first ap­proval of Lyri­ca, in the last few days of 2004, like most oth­er peo­ple: in the news­pa­per.

What be­came one of Pfiz­er’s top-sell­ing meds, at $5 bil­lion in 2017 glob­al sales be­fore los­ing patent pro­tec­tion in 2019, start­ed slip­ping out of his hands when North­west­ern li­censed it out to Parke-Davis, one of two biotechs that showed in­ter­est in de­vel­op­ing the drug in the pre-email days, when the uni­ver­si­ty’s two-per­son tech trans­fer team had to ship out let­ters to gar­ner in­dus­try ap­petite.

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