The Medicine Man

Widely Regarded as the father of Lipitor, Roger Newton is back at the helm of life-sciences company Esperion Therapeutics

By Candace Stuart

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When it comes to reducing arterial plaque, Roger Newton wants a new drug.

Photograph by Scott Stewart

To most people, the nondescript structure in Plymouth Township is nothing special. But in Roger Newton’s eyes, the nearly abandoned building will soon be bustling from morning to night with scientists and entrepreneurs who share the cause of building embryonic biotech startups into full-fledged companies. He envisions wet labs teeming with researchers, offices filled with innovators, and a cafeteria where workers from up to 10 different companies can feed off each other’s ideas and insights. Esperion Therapeutics, the company he built from scratch, took public, sold to Pfizer for $1.3 billion, and then won back during Pfizer’s restructuring, now sits as the anchor in what’s fast becoming a life-sciences incubator. And Newton, co-discoverer of the top-selling cholesterol drug Lipitor, is once again concentrating on making novel drugs that better the lives of people suffering from hardening of the arteries and cardiovascular disease.

That Newton is gifted is obvious. He’s an accomplished scientist, a proven entrepreneur, a skilled negotiator, a charismatic leader, and — in his words — one very lucky man. He doesn’t describe himself as the smartest, or the savviest, or the slickest. Instead, he works hard, listens to those he trusts, and follows his heart. He readily credits others for his success: the scientists at Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis, where he championed the drug that would become Lipitor amid skeptics and naysayers; his fellow co-founders at Esperion, who followed him from a secure corporate environment into Esperion’s startup mayhem; his mentors and professors, some of whom he’s acknowledged through fellowships; and his wife, Coco, whose advice and support helped him hack through many a professional and emotional thicket.

“I’ve learned that you don’t do what you do every day to get recognition from others,” he says. “You do it because it’s right.”
The gift connecting his many accomplishments is the ability to recognize potential where most people see failure, and then persuade others that he’s right. He did that with Lipitor, a drug almost mothballed in the 1980s that now brings in more than $12 billion in annual sales. He did that with Esperion, a company built in 1998 around a drug orphaned in an acquisition. He did that with the latest version of Esperion, which Pfizer was prepared to place in its throwaway bin in 2007. And now he’s acting on his convictions again.

“He’s a very important resource to the state of Michigan,” says Michael Finney, president and CEO of the economic-development organization Ann Arbor Spark, and part of the incubator planning team. “He’s probably the most successful entrepreneur that I’m aware of in the past 20 years [with] a homegrown company that achieved a tremendous success. To have him here and be available as a resource — first, to do again what he did before, and second, to be a resource for other entrepreneurs in the region — is incredible.”

At 58, Newton says he has no interest in retirement, although financially he could’ve swapped work for relaxation more than a decade ago. And no, his passion for battling atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) isn’t for personal reasons. Blood tests show his cholesterol levels are phenomenally good, thanks to an active lifestyle and sound eating habits. “You are what you put in your mouth,” says Newton, who holds a doctorate in nutrition. “I don’t take any medicine at all, and I’m not planning on taking any. And I’ve worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 27 years.” He has a deep knowledge of how the body takes in, makes, and uses low-density lipoproteins, or LDL, the “bad” cholesterol, as well as high-density lipoproteins, or HDL, the “good” cholesterol. Too much LDL can lead to plaque, a buildup of fat in the lining of arteries that can rupture and cause heart attacks or strokes. HDL helps eliminate LDL from the body. People with atherosclerosis often have too much LDL, too little HDL, or a combination of both.

Newton rose to fame starting in 1981 while at Parke-Davis, a subsidiary of Warner-Lambert, where he joined an atherosclerosis team in Ann Arbor. Newton and his colleagues had a monumental task in front of them. Parke-Davis was behind rivals Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and others in the race to develop a safe and effective statin drug. And statins were tricky. They could have unacceptable side-effects and could damage the liver.

Within four years, Newton became head of the atherosclerosis group and built it to a diverse 30-member team. Despite their talent, they tallied strikeout after strikeout. One promising candidate reached the scale-up stage, only to be trumped by a competitor’s first-to-file patent status. Two other formulations proved toxic, and another was taken up by organs other than the liver. Management and marketing
began grumbling about cost and competitive disadvantage. Newton, convinced that they could succeed with a drug that improves patients’ lives, insisted they stay the course. “We had four failures before we found …” Newton, a stickler for dates and names, pauses to get it right before rattling off a 10-digit code for the compound. “It was typical research. It’s kind of like the Aretha Franklin song: re-re-re-re ‘Respect.’ It’s research, not search. You have to do it many times to believe it.”

Even then, their last-gasp compound initially looked only minimally better than Merck’s Mevacor, a cholesterol-lowering drug approved for sale a year earlier and a first-to-market leader. Newton’s team then realized that their compound existed in two mirror forms, like a right hand and a left hand. One version was potent, the other only a hundredth as effective at lowering cholesterol. Weed out the ineffective version and they were in business. Newton still had to beg with the company’s review team — the story goes he went down on one knee, jokingly, to implore them to approve a small clinical trial — and wrangle with Parke-Davis management to keep the project afloat. He later paid a price for his persistence, but over the next several years of clinical trials, the drug that would be trademarked as Lipitor proved better than anything on the market. Lipitor won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 1996, and went on sale in 1997. Sales surpassed $1 billion in its first 12 months and reached $12.7 billion in 2007, making it the top-selling prescription drug in the world. Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert, Parke-Davis’ parent company, in 2000 to add Lipitor to its portfolio.

Newton credits his team for its success, while team members point to Newton’s passion, leadership, and willingness to battle corporate bureaucracy. “There needs to be a champion within Big Pharma to get to proof of concept,” says biochemist Michael Pape, a collaborator on Lipitor and co-founder of Esperion. He now heads up the scientific due-diligence team at Sigvion Capital in Chicago. “You have to have someone who can communicate the data. … Roger was persistent and aggressive.”

As Lipitor’s star rose, Newton’s career plummeted. The leadership he had challenged over the decade marginalized him in a restructuring, taking away his administrative position, dispersing his research team, and diminishing his influence. He recalled advice from his late father, who believed his boss undermined him and stole his ideas. If you lose the support of your boss, his father had advised, leave. “It was a blow to my ego, but what I realized is I couldn’t stay at Parke-Davis,” Newton says. “I couldn’t trust the people.”

Newton says the experience initially made him doubt his leadership ability. But then, with Coco as a sounding board, he began to reflect about his motivations and aspirations. He also consulted books like Deep Change, a guide by University of Michigan business professor Robert Quinn that tantalized Newton with the back cover blurb, “Don’t let your company kill you!” Quinn, now one of Newton’s confidants, encourages executives to examine their personal and professional goals and behaviors, and stretch beyond their comfort zones.