How Robert built the fortune
Robert Duggan's wealth comes largely from biotechnology, an industry he entered as an investor rather than as a scientist. His defining success was Pharmacyclics, a California drug developer that was struggling when he began buying its shares in the mid 2000s. He became its largest shareholder, joined the board and in 2008 took over as chief executive.
Under his leadership the company focused on ibrutinib, an oral drug that blocks an enzyme called Bruton's tyrosine kinase, which certain blood cancers depend on. Pharmacyclics partnered with Janssen, part of Johnson and Johnson, to develop and sell the medicine. Approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2013 under the name Imbruvica, it became a major treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and other B cell cancers.
In 2015 AbbVie agreed to acquire Pharmacyclics in a deal valued at about 21 billion dollars. Because Duggan owned a large share of the company, the sale turned his long position into a very large personal gain.
He later repeated the pattern at Summit Therapeutics, a smaller drug developer in which he became the dominant shareholder and, from 2020, chief executive. Summit licensed rights to an experimental cancer antibody called ivonescimab from the Chinese company Akeso in 2022, and the progress of that drug has driven much of Summit's value.
Duggan's style at both companies has been hands on. He has described spending time with clinical investigators and regulators, and at Pharmacyclics he pushed for faster development timelines by prioritising one lead drug rather than spreading resources across many programmes.
Companies and holdings
Duggan's main business interests are:
- Summit Therapeutics, where he is chairman and co chief executive and owns a majority of the shares
- Proceeds from the sale of Pharmacyclics to AbbVie
- Earlier stakes in technology and medical device companies
His approach has typically been to take a concentrated position in one company and work directly in its management rather than to spread money across many small bets. Summit moved its headquarters to Florida under his leadership, and Duggan has personally funded much of its capital needs through share purchases.
Summit's share price has moved sharply on clinical trial readouts for ivonescimab, particularly results in non small cell lung cancer compared with established treatments. As a result, the value of his holding can change substantially within days, which makes his wealth more volatile than that of most investors of similar standing.
He has also served on the boards of several other companies over his career, typically where he held a meaningful stake.
Early life and career
Duggan was born in 1944 and spent most of his working life in California. He built his early career in business and private investing rather than in science, taking stakes in a range of private and public companies and learning how to back management teams through long development cycles.
In the 1990s he became chief executive of Computer Motion, a Santa Barbara company that developed robotic systems for surgery. Computer Motion competed with Intuitive Surgical in the early market for surgical robots, and in 2003 the two companies merged, with Intuitive as the surviving group. That transaction gave Duggan an equity interest in one of the leading medical technology companies of the following decades and taught him how drawn out the path from technology to approved medical product can be.
After the Intuitive merger he continued investing on his own account, and his purchases of Pharmacyclics stock began while the company was still trading at a low value after setbacks with earlier drug candidates. Taking control of a struggling company and refocusing it became the pattern of his later career.
Philanthropy and public life
Duggan is one of the most prominent donors to the Church of Scientology, and his gifts to the organisation have been widely reported. He has also funded medical research and given to causes connected to cancer care, an area in which his business career has been centred.
He rarely gives interviews outside of company announcements and investor events. His public profile is tied almost entirely to the companies he runs, and in recent years to the clinical trial results that determine Summit's prospects.
Some of his medical giving has been directed toward research on the types of blood cancer that Imbruvica treats, as well as to hospitals and patient support groups, though he does not publish a detailed record of these donations.