A perilous pursuit

Trump's aide Vivek Ramaswamy has a risky agenda on his side; he wants to gut the Food and Drug Administration to make drug approvals easy and quick

- LATHA JISHNU

Failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is making more news now than during his doomed attempt to get the party nomination for president. Ramaswamy's decision to throw in the towel and back Donald Trump after his campaign went nowhere showed acumen, the kind he is famous for in the investment world. The president-elect has appointed the Indian-origin pharma investor, along with Elon Musk, as the head of an initiative to slash the federal bureaucracy. For Ramaswamy, heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the perfect reward: he does not like federal agencies and wants to shut down the Department of Education and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and drastically restructure the Federal Reserve. But his main target is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal pharmaceutical regulator which has been in his cross hairs since the time he set up his drug manufacturing company Roivant Sciences and its much-hyped drug failed to make the cut.

The story of Ramaswamy and his visceral antipathy to FDA is tied up with his business approach to pharma manufacture. He is given to projecting himself as a scientist from the biotechnology sphere, although he is no scientist, and has just an undergraduate degree in biology. His graduate degree is in law and he started his career with a hedge fund company where he specialized in biotech investments. That appears to have fuelled the idea of setting up his own pharma ventures. His model was simple: scour the patent web for drugs that had been abandoned by pharma majors, buy out the patents—these could be had for a song—and develop and bring them to market to make a killing. The model was very much that of Martin Shkreli's.