In the incident room he hands me a massive stack of papers. It must be well over 200 pages of assorted papers and looks like it must’ve taken Jansen a significant chunk of time to pull together. Luckily the caffeine’s synergizing nicely with the dab and I feel motivated. I find a desk and settle in for the long haul.

The background to the company I already know; I’m more interested in the years when Muller and Kleine were both on the board, and I quickly narrow it down and focus my attention there. After a good hour of solid reading I’m beginning to get a picture, a company with financial difficulties which had pinned its hopes, and dwindling resources, on an experimental drug simply codenamed FAA673. I have to skip some of the more intense pharmacology. I realize that Joel would probably be able to help with that if needs be, but in essence FAA673 was a compound targeting a specific set of receptors in the brain implicated in appetite control, and it was hoped this could prove a preventative to obesity and therefore to all the other associated problems: diabetes, heart disease, cancer. Basically, reading between the lines, they were confident that this could become a first-line treatment, a drug that every doctor could prescribe to patients at risk. Which is probably just about everyone. I’m starting to see why they believed FAA673 could be so lucrative. One executive had noted in an email that FAA673 could be bigger than statins.

Joel had once told me about statins, a long rant demonstrating that not only were they not necessary, but they were actively screwing with you. I don’t remember the details, but he was pretty plausible. It was things like that which made him switch sides, as it were. Google gives me a rough global market value of over 30 billion dollars a year.

If FAA673 could come even close to that, then no wonder they were excited.

The animal trials had gone well, and they’d had approval from all the regulatory bodies to progress to a phase-one trial, which from what I read means the first trial on humans after it’s been tested on animals. But after that the information starts to become more sparse, and just over a year and a half later the company posts an enormous loss in their accounts.