Meet Herriot Tabuteau, A Haitian Doctor Behind A $6B Self-Funded Drug Developing Company Helping Those With Brain Disorders
Herriot Tabuteau was supposed to become a doctor, but he decided to launch a billion-dollar business instead.
Forbes reports Tabuteau was born and raised in Haiti, and he says his upbringing “taught me resilience.” Though he had been living with his mother, at age 9, he moved in with his father in Manhattan, NY’s Upper East Side. With aspirations of becoming a neurosurgeon, he obtained a biochemistry and molecular biology degree from Wesleyan University and was then admitted into Yale University School of Medicine where he received his MD.
Tabuteau decided to make a career pivot after observing the “unhappiness” of his physician professors. He went into finance, beginning at Goldman Sachs where he worked in the company’s healthcare investment banking group. Having spent almost two decades in finance, his track record in the industry included time at Bank of America Securities, Healthco/S.A.C. Capital, and managing his own funds, with some of his investments in biotech startups, according to Forbes.
In 2012, Tabuteau took a chance on the drug industry, bootstrapping Axsome Therapeutics as a drug development company with the support of family and friends. He pulled from his experience in medicine and observations from biotech startups, opting to adopt unconventional processes such as conducting clinical trials in-house instead of outsourcing them.
“If you do things exactly the same way as everybody else, you’re going to have the same outcomes as everybody else. And we wanted to have outcomes that stand apart,” he told Forbes.
Axsome Therapeutics, which went public in 2015, currently has three drugs in its portfolio and five more in development that may help with depression, ADHD, or Alzheimer’s disease, with the potential to benefit nearly 150 million people living in the U.S.
The company is doing well on Nasdaq, with a market capitalization of $6.1 billion, which places Tabuteau at billionaire status since he has a 15% stake in the company. Revenue has also hit $495 million for the fiscal year that ended in June.
However, the company is not yet profitable. Previously, its stock had dipped to under $10 for years with a market cap under $100 million. But the company saw a major turn with its first significant drug Auvelity, which treats major depressive disorder and was approved by the FDA in 2022. The company’s valuation rose to $3 billion just a week after its approval, and drug results were favorable, reportedly showing improvements faster than competing serotonin-based antidepressants. Auvelity is on pace to earn $500 million in sales in 2025, and Tabuteau estimates that at its peak, earnings could reach between $1 billion and $3 billion.
“There is so much ahead of us right now in terms of the pipeline and the number of patients we’re able to address,” Tabuteau expressed, according to Forbes. “We might be a small company in terms of size, but we’re not a small company in terms of fundamentals or in terms of ambition.”
