Michael Ridpath - Final Venture

'But that didn't satisfy Lisa?'

Kelly smiled. 'You know her. She wouldn't be satisfied until she had seen the data itself. When Enema still refused to show it to her, she more or less called him a liar. She accused him of not checking the numbers carefully enough.'

'So he fired her?'

'Not surprisingly,' said Kelly.

It didn't surprise me at all. I knew that she had given Henry Chan a similarly difficult time over the years, but he had much more patience than Enever. I now understood why he felt that Lisa wouldn't fit into the new BioOne culture.

'Do you think Lisa was right to be concerned?' I asked Kelly.

'I didn't see the data myself; this is all stuff I heard from Lisa,' Kelly said. 'And I'd guess that statistically Enema was right. But I've worked with Lisa for two years. I trust her hunches. There may be something there, I don't know.'

'How can I find out?' I asked.

'You?' Kelly looked surprised. 'You can't.'

'Can you help me?'

Kelly looked down at her plate, now almost empty. 'I can't. Unlike Lisa, I don't have another job to go to if I get fired. Thomas Enever is a powerful enemy that I don't need right now.'

'Hmm. Have the clinical trials shown the same problem to be present in humans?'

'I assume not,' Kelly said. 'I mean all that data is shown to the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA would be pretty unhappy if everyone who took neuroxil-5 had a stroke the next day.'

'But what if it was just a few patients and it was several months later?'

Kelly thought about it. 'I don't know. The Phase One and Two clinical trials probably involved only about a hundred people, total. It is possible that something that affected a small minority of patients might slip through unnoticed. That's why they have these massive Phase Three trials, with a thousand patients or more.'

'And that's what's going on now, isn't it?'

'That's right. They end in March next year.'

'Do you have any idea about the results of these trials?'

'Are you kidding?' Kelly snorted. 'Only Enever knows. And at this stage, even he isn't supposed to.'

I remembered the note in Art's BioOne files about the trial being double blind.

'Is there any way of finding out?'

'No,' said Kelly. I paused to let her think. 'Not unless you actually go and talk to the clinicians who are conducting the trials themselves.'

'Can you get me a list of them?'

'No way,' Kelly said.

I was disappointed. I was sure Lisa had been on to something, but it was hard to see how I, single-handedly, could break through BioOne's wall of secrecy.

'There is one thing you could do,' Kelly said. 'I'm pretty sure that the Phase Two trial was written up in the New England Journal of Medicine. I remember the buzz in the industry when it was published.'

'So do I. That was when the BioOne stock price shot up, wasn't it?'

'Possibly. You're the money man. I just make the drugs.'

I acknowledged the dig.

'Sorry,' Kelly said. 'There will probably be a list of clinicians involved with the Phase Two trial there. Many of them will be signed up for the new trial. You could talk to some of them.'

'Thanks,' I said. 'I'll try it.'

We ate our food, Kelly hurrying so that she could get away without being seen.

'How's Boston Peptides getting on without Lisa?' I asked.

'We miss her. BP 56 is going well. We're getting the first responses from human volunteers. It looks like the drug is safe, although it seems to cause depression in some people.'

'Depression?'

'Yes. It can reduce the levels of serotonin in the brain. Kind of like the opposite of Prozac'

Depression.

Lisa had been taking BP 56.

I remembered her fragility a week or so after Frank's death, the way she had lost her temper with me, her uncharacteristic irrationality, her black moods, and most of all, my total inability to help her. A chemically induced depression, combined with all those other pressures, must have been very hard to cope with. No wonder she had cracked and run away.

'What is it Simon?'

Lisa had said she wanted to keep the fact she was taking the drug quiet from everyone at work. I wasn't sure whether that included Kelly, but it was probably up to Lisa to tell her, not me. 'Oh, I was just thinking,' I said, vaguely. 'It's not serious enough to fail the drug, is it?'

'Oh, no,' said Kelly. 'There are ways around it. It may be as simple as prescribing Prozac in combination with BP 56.' She looked at her watch. 'I've got to go. Do you mind if you wait here for a couple of minutes before you leave? I really don't want anyone to see us together.'

'OK,' I said, deciding that there was no need for Kelly to know that she was being watched as she spoke. 'You go. And thank you.'

She smiled quickly and left.

I waited a few moments, and sauntered round the corner to a bar I used to frequent, just on the Cambridge side of the bridge from the Business School. My female tail stayed outside. I ordered a beer, and thought through what Kelly had told me.

So Lisa had been depressed. Not the kind of depression that comes from stress at work, and grief, and marital difficulties, but biochemically induced stress, which would make the world seem bleak even in the most normal of times. Given the pressure Lisa had been under, the world must have seemed a very dark place indeed.

In some ways, this news made me feel better. Without the drug, I should have a much better chance of persuading her to come back to me. But I still needed to prove that I hadn't killed Frank.

So the next question was, was there a problem with neuroxil-5? I had to admit that there was a chance that the answer was 'no'. That the numbers that Lisa had seen were not from a valid statistical sample, and just represented the kind of false coincidences that happened all the time. Well, if that was the case, then I was wasting a lot of time and effort.

But what if Lisa's hunch was right? What if neuroxil-5 caused occasional strokes in rats? What would that mean?

It could mean the drug was killing some of the people it was supposed to be curing. That would be a disaster. For the Alzheimer patients who were taking it, for BioOne, and for Revere.

I wasn't sure what Frank and John had to do with this potential catastrophe. Frank had little involvement with BioOne, Art had always seen to that. But there was Art's cryptic comment that Frank had been asking questions about BioOne just before he died. And of course there was the message John had left, saying he had discovered something about BioOne that I would find interesting. Could that have been that neuroxil-5 was dangerous?

At the moment it was a big if. What I needed to do was find proof one way or another. I polished off my beer and took the 'T' home.

The New England Journal of Medicine was on the Internet. I quickly found an abstract of the article Kelly had mentioned. I had to call the journal directly to have the full article faxed to me. The title was A Controlled Trial of Neuroxil-5 as a Treatment for Alzheimer's Disease'. There was a formidable list of authors, but the first name on the list was none other than Thomas E. Enever. It described the Phase Two clinical trial on eighty-four patients with Alzheimer's. The sample was too small to draw definitive conclusions, but the paper seemed to suggest that the results were encouraging. There were no statistically significant differences in the 'adverse-event categories' between the group that had taken neuroxil-5, and the group that had taken the placebo. At the end of an article was a list of six centres participating in the study, together with the clinicians responsible. Kelly had suggested that it was likely that most of these would also be involved in the larger Phase Three trial.

It took an hour of fiddling about on the Internet before I had the names and addresses of these six centres. Four of them were in New England, one was in Illinois, and one in Florida, no doubt a prime Alzheimer's location. It was five o'clock. I resolved to see the four New England centres the next morning.