Iranian Immigrant Becomes Billionaire As Her Biotech Firm’s Stock Soars

In the ultra-competitive world of cancer medicines, Summit Therapeutics is a relative minnow. The 21-year-old biotech company has just 130 employees, no revenue and no approved drugs. But in the past two weeks, its market capitalization has exploded following positive news about its most promising drug candidate.

Shares of Nasdaq-listed Summit Therapeutics nearly doubled since September 6, lifting the company's market capitalization to $17 billion. (Shares peaked at $31.93 on September 13 and dropped back to $23.16 as of September 19.) That has in turn made its co-CEO, Maky Zanganeh, with a stake just under 5% plus a slew of options, a new billionaire—worth an estimated $1.1 billion. She's one of just 34 self-made U.S. women billionaires, and one of three American women to have made a billion-dollar fortune in the healthcare sector. The other two: Bio-Rad Laboratories cofounder Alice Schwartz and United Therapeutics founder Martine Rothblatt .

Summit's other co-CEO, Robert ("Bob") Duggan , joined Forbes' billionaire ranks in 2013 based on the success of Pharmacyclics, a struggling drug development company that he turned around–with help from Zanganeh, who served as chief operating officer. Duggan, who owns 75% of Summit's stock (he recently spent $75 million to increase his holding), is now worth an estimated $14.9 billion.

Summit's latest stock runup started on Monday, September 9, the day after data from a recent trial was presented at the World Conference on Lung Cancer in San Diego. The trial showed that in non-small cell lung cancer (the most common type of lung cancer), Summit's experimental therapy, ivonescimab, performed better than Merck's Keytruda–a blockbuster drug that generated $25 billion in sales last year, reportedly making it the world's top-selling medicine.

"The big news was that we could beat Keytruda," says Zanganeh.

The trial showed a 49% reduced risk of tumor progression with Summit's ivonescimab compared to Keytruda. Patients who took ivonescimab went 11.4 months before tumors grew again, versus 5.8 months for patients taking Keytruda.

Summit Therapeutics licensed ivonescimab from Hong Kong-listed firm Akeso in December 2022 for $500 million up front and an additional $4.5 billion if certain milestones are met. Summit has the rights to market the drug in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Akeso's cofounder, CEO and chairman Xia Yu, who also goes by Michelle Xia, serves on Summit Therapeutics' board of directors.

The data presented on September 8 was based on a trial conducted in China. In order for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve ivonescimab, Summit Therapeutics will be conducting a global Phase 3 trial, a process that could take 18 months or more. Analysts from investment banking firm Stifel don't project any revenue for Summit through 2025.

Zanganeh, who's 54, has followed an unusual path to become a biotech CEO. She was born in Tehran, Iran, the youngest of three girls, to architect parents and was eight years old when the Shah was overthrown in early 1979. The following year, the Iran-Iraq war began. "We constantly had to face the fear of bombing," she wrote in her 2021 memoir, The Magic of Normal. "We never knew if the bombs would hit our home or not." When she was about 11 years old, a friend of her father's in Germany helped get the family German visas so they could leave Iran. The difficulty was getting a flight out of Tehran, because airports were often closed. Zanganeh and her parents ended up flying to Germany via Austria, she recounts in her memoir. They lived in Oldenburg, a small town in northern Germany near Hamburg, and she learned German. Her parents ended up returning to Iran, but Zanganeh stayed in Germany for high school, first living with a friend and then with an uncle.

Both of her sisters ended up going to medical school in Strasbourg, France, so Zanganeh's father encouraged her to attend university there as well, which meant she had to learn French. She studied dentistry at the University of Strasbourg, with a focus on pediatric dentistry, and graduated in 1995, but wasn't convinced she wanted a career as a dentist. In 1997, an Iranian friend was working in Europe for U.S. robotic surgery company Computer Motion, whose CEO was Bob Duggan. Zanganeh became fascinated with the work and took a job as a coordinator for Europe for the company–while also getting an MBA degree from Schiller University, a U.S. school with a program in Strasbourg. She was eventually promoted to Computer Motion's head of Europe and Middle East and then in 2002 to global vice president for training and education, which resulted in a move to its headquarters in Santa Barbara, California. The following year, competitor Intuitive Surgical acquired Computer Motion and Zanganeh left the company.

She ended up working with Duggan at his investment firm, Robert Duggan & Associates, as vice president of business development, and that led to their next chapter. In searching for investments, they landed on small publicly-traded drug developer Pharmacyclics, first investing in 2004. The company struggled to get a drug approved and Duggan took over running it in 2008 after the board resigned. Zanganeh became vice president of business development that year and in 2012, the chief operating officer. Pharmacyclics hit success with a drug called Imbruvica, which was approved to treat a blood cancer, chronic lymphocytic leukemia. In 2015, pharma heavyweight AbbVie bought Pharmacyclics for $21 billion in cash and shares.

In 2020, Duggan purchased more than 60% of Summit Therapeutics' stock for $63 million and became CEO. Zanganeh, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020 and has since recovered, joined the Summit board in late 2020 and became co-CEO in September 2022– several months before inking the deal with Akeso.

Zanganeh and Duggan have big hopes for Summit's ivonescimab. There are 20 clinical trials currently ongoing in China with the drug candidate, including for triple-negative breast cancer, colorectal cancer and head and neck cancer. "The probability of success is very high," says Duggan. "That's not usually the case in biotech."