For Sherman, though, the regulators, the courts, and the media were always in the wrong. “Barry believed he was always right,” says Desai.
The most public fight Sherman engaged in was a nasty conflict over a drug called deferiprone, a treatment for a relatively small group of people worldwide who suffer from the blood disease thalassemia. Books have been written about the decades-long dispute, and John le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener appears to have taken inspiration for one of its characters from Sherman’s opponent. Libel suits were filed against the media who covered the case, and it led to Sherman’s appearance, in a highly embarrassing interview, on the CBS program 60 Minutes.
Pitted against Sherman and Apotex was Dr. Nancy Olivieri, a Toronto researcher who for a time in the 1990s became a media darling. After years of lawsuits, both sides signed a settlement and agreed not to say anything disparaging about the other. In her book about the conflict, The Drug Trial, journalist Miriam Shuchman referred to the saga as “the scientific version of a Greek epic.”
Thalassemia is the name given to a group of relatively rare genetic disorders that cause anemia because the red blood cells in the body do not form properly and as a result do not carry enough oxygen through the bloodstream. Thalassemia is most common in the developing world; one research paper estimated that there are about 100,000 people with the genetic disease in India. In Canada, just 250 people are known to suffer from the disease, and in the United States 1,000. In Europe, it is more prevalent; there are an estimated 10,000 people with the disease, with significant clusters in Italy and Cyprus. Conditions like this, affecting only a relatively small number of patients, are called orphan diseases. Treating them calls for an “orphan drug,” which, due to the small population at risk, is very expensive to design and produce.
The condition starts in early childhood, and the only known treatment is frequent blood transfusions, typically every two to four weeks. Along with the hardship of frequent transfusions comes a killer: iron overload. This is a situation where both the disease and the treatment can kill you. In healthy circumstances, the human body maintains its necessary iron in balance. But when blood transfusion on a regular basis introduces more iron, the body cannot handle it and the resulting iron buildup clogs the heart, liver, and other organs. It is typically fatal. Without some way to remove the iron, many patients die in their teens. For many years, the best drug was the very expensive Desferal, which is a “chelator,” meaning that once it is inside the body, it attaches, or binds, to iron and is then flushed out of the body as waste. The problem with Desferal was that it had to be administered either by a painful regular injection or an uncomfortable infusion over a twelve-hour period several times a week. Some patients were also allergic to it. It was bad enough that young patients had to get blood transfusions every few weeks; having to then receive frequent injections or infusions to lower iron levels was so onerous that teen patients were opting out, getting sicker and dying. The holy grail researchers in many countries said they were seeking was a daily pill.
Nancy Olivieri was a young pediatric hematologist working at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in the late 1980s when she became fascinated by the disease. Worldwide, there were pockets of researchers looking for a solution. The drug formulation called deferiprone was one candidate, and Olivieri believed it was promising. Olivieri teamed up with Dr. Michael Spino, a University of Toronto researcher and professor who was doing some consulting work for Apotex and would soon be hired by Sherman to run ApoPharma, his new division that sought to develop its own brand name drugs, not just generic copies. To bring a drug to market required expensive trials, and Olivieri needed funding for tests on deferiprone. At the time, in the late 1980s, Apotex was not the multi-billion-dollar company it would become; sales then were about $200 million. A private company, it did not make public its profits.
The theory was that if a thalassemia patient could take a pill orally, the medication would bind to excess iron and remove it from the body. In an interview, Spino said Olivieri and another researcher had come to him at ApoPharma and asked if he thought Sherman would be interested in funding the clinical tests to study deferiprone. Spino agreed to take the pitch to his boss, though he was not confident he would be given a green light. Developing a new drug can cost tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, of dollars, and Spino was still new to the business, having spent his entire career at universities and hospitals.
He recalls how he tried to almost goad Sherman into funding the research. “Barry, I’ve come from academia,” he said, “and let me tell you what the perception of generic drugs is there. That they’re piranhas. The real drug companies do the research and then the generics come in and pick the cherries and make the money off that.”
Sherman, Spino says, was deeply offended. “We’re saving the public billions of dollars!” he shot back.
“Why don’t we do something to show that we are different,” Spino suggested. “Why don’t we take a drug that nobody’s going to develop. It’s needed because patients are going to die. Why don’t we develop it for the needs of the community.”
Sherman scratched his head. “Will it work?”
Spino smiled. “I’m pretty sure I have the evidence that it will work. And if we don’t do it, nobody else will do it.”
“Can we make any money?” Sherman asked.
“I’m not sure if we will make any money. But we may break even.”
Sherman scratched his head again. “Okay. Do it.”
That decision began a clinical research project that for many years made headlines for Sherman and Apotex, most of them negative. During the human clinical trials for the drug she had brought to ApoPharma, Olivieri became concerned that the drug was toxic to the liver and ineffective. She wanted to raise those concerns publicly but was told by Apotex that due to the confidentiality section of her contract with them she could not. Apotex researchers believed in the drug and wanted to continue its tests. Olivieri did raise her concerns publicly, writing letters to patients in the trial as well. Apotex informed Olivieri that she was effectively fired from the drug trial program for breaching confidentiality, and the battle was on, raging in the media and the courts for well over a decade. Many sided with Olivieri, at least initially, and there can be no doubt that vitally important issues were in play. Academic freedom was being tested. Also in question was just how much the public and patients should be told while a drug was being tested on humans. Among the notable events in this battle, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed a very stiff and at times upset-looking Barry Sherman. According to Shuchman’s The Drug Trial, during the interview Sherman muttered “She’s nuts,” referring to Olivieri. In an account of the interview provided by Shuchman, Sherman then offered to say “certain things” to Stahl “off the record,” and Stahl shot back, “We’re reporters, we’re not your pals.” Just that short exchange led to one of the many lawsuits in the case: Olivieri sued Sherman for libelling her in the interview.
Meanwhile, at ApoPharma, Spino hired Dr. Fernando Tricta, a Brazilian hematologist who for many years had been treating thalassemia patients in Brazil and also in Italy. Tricta was put in a room for three months to review all the testing literature on deferiprone. He disagreed with Olivieri’s conclusions. Still, the ferociousness of the controversy, which made daily headlines at one point, affected him deeply. One night, when Tricta was out to see a movie with his wife in Toronto, a fellow theatregoer noticed he was wearing an Apotex jacket. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” the woman said.
Not long after that, with executives at Apotex becoming concerned that Olivieri’s dispute was ruining the image of the firm, a meeting was held. Some present wanted to stop the clinical trials. Tricta says Sherman listened to all sides, then stood up. “This is a drug patients need,” Sherman said. “No other company will do it. It’s the right thing to do. We will do it.”
Neither side will
discuss the intricacies of the case. Olivieri, when asked to speak about the deferiprone research and her own interactions with Sherman, declined an interview but then sent me a dozen emails containing links to studies, reports, legal actions, and other information related to what she said was ultimately a nineteen-year fight. Asked about a thalassemia patient group that, in the final year of Sherman’s life, had lauded Apotex, Spino, Tricta, and Sherman for saving the lives of thousands of patients, Olivieri was skeptical and alluded to how patient groups often receive funding from pharmaceutical companies, telling me in an email that as a general rule “inquiries about who (and what companies) funds which patient organizations are never misplaced.” Indeed, after checking the financial records of the patient group in question, I discovered that it had received a grant of US$102,000 from an Apotex charity the same year as it praised Apotex and its researchers.
Spino, who is still president of ApoPharma almost two decades after he joined (Tricta is there too, and both men are researching other potential uses for deferiprone), says he, Sherman, and the researchers were hurt by the attacks. He says much of the media portrayed Apotex as a company that, through its research, was “causing death in children for the motivation of money.” It was exactly the opposite, he says. To begin with, millions of dollars were being spent with little hope of a return. Eventually, through continued testing after Olivieri was no longer involved, Spino and Tricta learned that the drug deferiprone “protected the heart” more than any other chelator used to remove iron, and that more people survived with it than with Desferal: “It gets into the heart and removes the iron.” Additional studies eventually backed deferiprone and it was licensed around the world under the ApoPharma brand name Ferriprox. It was first sold in India in 1994, then in Europe (1999), followed by the United States (2011) and Canada (2015).
The controversy still shows no sign of going away, with competing research papers differing on the health risks to patients. One study published in 2018 by the British Journal of Haematology involving five hundred patients determined that deferiprone reduced cardiac iron more than a competing drug. In 2019, a Toronto researcher working with Olivieri examined the clinical studies of forty-one patients and published a paper in PLOS ONE, a Public Library of Science journal, stating that patients on deferiprone had an elevated incidence of diabetes and liver dysfunction.
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Throughout the years of the Olivieri conflict, Apotex grew, adding its production facilities in Mexico and India. Jeremy Desai says that at the time of Sherman’s death, production had just surpassed twenty-five billion dosages (tablets, capsules, or other single-dosage forms) a year, more than halfway to Sherman’s goal of reaching fifty billion.
The many Apotex facilities in Ontario are impressive, an expansion beyond the Ormont Drive factory that has been ongoing since the early 1980s. A sign at each facility greets visitors and sets out the beliefs that Apotex seeks to instill in its employees: “I am dedicated. I am non-compromising. I am accountable.” Touring a visitor around the plants, scientists, many of them twenty-year employees, show off gleaming modern equipment in well-designed buildings, some with ceilings seventy feet high; rooms with airlocks to keep out contaminants; robots that move product around; heavy drums of raw materials shipped in to be refined into the unformed finished product (chemists call it “the dope”), which will be sent to another factory to become pills. One of the chemists at the facility that processes the raw active pharmaceutical ingredient notes that it refines about five metric tons of deferiprone annually, just as an example of the scale of production. Senior scientists at these production facilities say Sherman almost never visited, but he made sure that they had the state-of-the-art equipment needed to get the job done. Dan Matu, the production manager at Apotex’s plant in Brantford, Ontario, who has been with the company since he came to Canada from Romania in the early 1990s, says, “Dr. Sherman created the environment for people to do this work.” And tours through the Apotex factories reveal something Sherman and Jack Kay took a great deal of pride in: over eighty different cultures made up the workforce, chemists and other scientists who immigrated to Canada and wound up working for the generic firm.
By the time of Sherman’s death, Apotex had revenues of US$1.6 billion a year. As a private company, their actual profit is not made public.
ELEVEN
KING AND QUEEN
BARRY SHERMAN, SPORTING A BROWN checked suit with a diagonally striped tie, sits beside his wife, Honey, both of them perched on director’s chairs in a studio. It is October 11, 2017, two months before they will be found dead. A clean white background puts the focus on the power couple. A video camera rolls. As part of an effort to celebrate volunteers and donors, the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto (UJA) is preparing a tribute to two of its most generous supporters: Honey Sherman and her husband, Barry. Honey, wearing a crisp white shirt with a big collar, a black jacket, and a pearl choker, begins by explaining to donors and volunteers how her family, having survived unimaginable conditions during the Holocaust, ended up in Halifax, on Canada’s east coast. After some Maritime hospitality, Honey Reich and her family, along with other Jews who had been living in displaced persons camps in Austria and Germany before making the ocean crossing to Canada, boarded a train to Winnipeg. In Toronto, there was a change of plans for the Reichs. A Jewish Immigrant Aid Service leader came on board and offered lodging and jobs to those who wished to disembark. The Reichs got off the train. The memory of that generosity, from people her family did not know, stuck with Honey. She goes on to explain how it was not until years later, when she was newly married to Barry, that she received her first request for a donation to a Jewish cause: just $100. Honey says she told the fundraiser, a friend from childhood, that she would give it her consideration, but she did not donate on the spot: “I disappointed her grossly. I said, ‘Let me go home and think about it and get back to you.’ ”
Honey then describes how she went home, discussed it with Barry, and the next day made an anonymous gift of $1,000. The friend, Honey says, likely never knew she had made such a deep impact. And as stories of Barry Sherman’s success in the generic pharmaceuticals world spread, requests for donations intensified. “That’s how it started. People started to ask, and we were able to do it.”
Barry is watching Honey tell her story. He smiles. His gaze does not waver from his wife. Honey’s right hand is lying comfortably on the armrest of her husband’s chair, their wrists touching. Now it’s her turn to watch Barry speak. The message he delivers is one he has repeated many times to people who have been targets of his often aggressive fundraising requests.
“I don’t think any person can be a happy person if he is successful in life and doesn’t give back to the communities,” Sherman says, smiling. “I would encourage all youngsters to get involved and always make it the focus of their lives and participate in society and to give back, because that is a source of great satisfaction.” As Barry speaks, Honey reaches over and makes an adjustment to his tie, which is poking out of his buttoned suit jacket a bit too much for her liking. That small gesture is typical of one part of their relationship. Honey wanted to make sure her Chuck was presentable to the public.
Later in the video, the couple is laughing at a story of the origin of their first large donation. It was to assist in the international Operation Exodus campaign to help Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrate to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A well-known man in Toronto’s Jewish community telephoned the forty-six-year-old Barry Sherman in 1989 and said, “Barry, this is an emergency campaign….Would I be crazy to ask you for a million dollars?” In those days, at the start of Apotex’s success, “that was a lot of money,” Sherman recalls. He hung up, he says, and talked to Honey. Then he called the man back a few minutes later to say he would write a cheque for the requested amount. The two burst into laughter on camera when Honey reminds her husband that the fundr
aiser on the Exodus campaign was kicking himself afterwards, saying, “Dammit, I didn’t ask for enough!”
The story finished, Honey gives her husband a playful nudge. His suit jacket is riding up at the shoulders. “Now, you’ve got to sit up straight and pull down your jacket,” she tells him. He does.
Over the years, Honey encouraged Barry to break out from his normal wardrobe—“Barry’s uniform,” Apotex colleagues called it—of white shirt and grey slacks. Barry, by all accounts, cared as much for nice clothes as he did for nice cars. Which is to say, not at all. At one point, in exasperation, Honey even enlisted their friends Fred and Bryna Steiner to take Barry to the high-end menswear shop Harry Rosen to see if the clothiers there could make an impact. The effort met with limited success. Barry Sherman did not think that clothes made the man; rather, it was intellect, drive, and how much you gave back to your community.
The UJA video filmed two months before their deaths was eventually shown the following year as part of a tribute to the Shermans. At the event, on June 8, 2018, organizers announced they were posthumously giving Honey the Ben Sadowski Award of Merit to acknowledge her “outstanding leadership qualities and years of involvement in the Jewish and general communities.” Though seen as a high-powered couple—friends dubbed them the “king and queen” of Jewish fundraising—it was their individual and very different achievements that were remembered. Barry Sherman, the leader of a generic drug powerhouse who gave away hundreds of millions of dollars. Honey Sherman, the tireless charity volunteer who sat on boards and asked tough questions to ensure that the family money was well spent.
The Billionaire Murders Page 18