Global HC Analytics LLC

The Future of HealthCare Analytics is Right Here, Ba-bay!

Our Founder & Managing Principal, Jeff Conroy's, First Self-Published Book, "Blood Money", his exclusive autobiographical memoirs of his "Celgene Decade" are being Sold and Distributed as a PDF (eBook) Here, at https://theghca.com/ !

The First Chapter is available here, on Jeff's LinkedIn Profile:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blood-money-cancer-capital-compelling-story-celgenes-golden-conroy-fcqke/

God Bless America...Again. (GBA...A)

Free Classic Country Here, Too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTGKA77WVUk

Make America Green... Again! (MAGA!)

Get America Going... Alright? (GAGA?)

Version Shared on www.theghca.com

October 18th, 2026 ~ 12:45PM EST (North Jersey Time)

Prologue (AKA Chapter 1): The Multiple Myeloma Monster in the Former Summit Middle School

There is a strange, jarring poetry to saving cancer patients inside a building that once taught middle school algebra.

Celgene’s global headquarters in Summit, New Jersey, was an uncanny metaphor for the company itself. It didn’t look like a $100 billion biopharma titan or the polished Manhattan financial institution it would eventually resemble. It was a converted middle school—an odd, repurposed campus housing one of the most profitable oncology engines in the history of biotechnology.

Walking through the complex in August 2011, and for years after, you could still feel the phantom geometry of institutional hallways and repurposed classrooms. Yet behind those brick walls sat a commercial machine built on pills—specifically, immunomodulatory drugs derived from thalidomide. Revlimid, the crown jewel, was printing money at an unheard‑of scale. Multiple myeloma accounted for roughly 90 percent of company sales, with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) adding a modest tail. Pomalyst was on deck, primed to generate billions more.

Celgene was a financial monster. But it was a single‑organism monster, and Revlimid’s patent cliff was already visible on the horizon.

Attempts to expand immunomodulatory drugs into solid tumors hit a hard biological wall. Solid tumors—lung, breast, pancreatic—were an entirely different beast. To satisfy Wall Street’s insatiable demand for growth, Celgene did what it did best: it wrote a massive check. In June 2010, the company acquired Abraxis BioScience for $2.9 billion to obtain Abraxane, a nanoparticle albumin‑bound paclitaxel designed for solid tumors. The main reason to buy Abraxis was because of Abraxane's potential to help metastatic pancreatic cancer patients and also potentially triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). While Abraxane ultimately had a positive phase 3 readout in metastatic pancreatic cancer (a 2-month overall survival benefit in PDAC which led to it becoming a $1B drug, along with creative contracting structures and a strong education, AKA pharmaceutical marketing, campaign), it did not succeed in TNBC. But the learnings from how Abraxis was developed and then turned into a blockbuster are important now as Revolution Medicines, Immuneering Corporation, and the amazing Pancreatic Cancer Action Network—amongst others—work to further improve Overall Survival (OS) and Quality of Life (QoL) for these pancreatic cancer patients.

The acquisition sent a signal to the rest of the world's biopharma. Celgene had won a big, competitive bid for a compelling asset. But while the executive suite celebrated, commercial leadership hit an immediate operational crisis: the entire biostatistical and reporting infrastructure had been built too simply. True Hematology-Oncology and Solid Tumor commercialization required completely different data models, tracking frameworks, and real‑world intelligence engines. Legacy analysts—accustomed to pushing canned quarterly spreadsheets—were simply out of their depth. And as internal trials failed in solid tumors, Abraxane became the lone blockbuster candidate once metastatic pancreatic cancer data read out and won FDA approval—an extraordinary opportunity to combat one of humanity’s deadliest malignancies.

Celgene didn’t need another traditional pharma market researcher. It needed a Computer, or Systems, Engineer who could build a commercial warfare engine from scratch. CEO Bob "Huggy Bear" Hugin had instituted an uncompromising mandate: reduce reliance on remote contractors, no outsourced agencies. Bodies in seats, in Summit, working together and learning together. Every. Single. Day. I prefer the Hybrid model... but I learned so much by being In Person, and I hope my LinkedIn audience agrees that In Meeting Work is Important.

For nearly a year, the search dragged on. The candidate pool of database architects who understood complex systems code, lived within commuting distance of Summit, and possessed real‑world operational drive was virtually nonexistent.

Until August 2011, when I walked through the doors and people had no idea who I was or what I was doing for my team and the entire US Commercial Organization. Even Shawn Tomasello asked me in late 2012—over a year after I joined!—what I did at a Sales Training Lunch. I calmly explained that I worked for Max in Sales Operations, whom she liked, and that I was a Senior Analyst working to support the entire sales and marketing team with best-in-class analytics. I also mentioned that I heard she was from Ohio—which I also was. Shawn was amazing. She was tough, but led like a Celgene executive should. She left in 2014 and hit several home runs in a row—she is still a Legend to those who followed her moves and invested in companies just because she joined, e.g., Pharmacyclics, an AbbVie Company (before it was bought by ABBV) and Kite Pharma (again... before it was bought by Gilead Sciences!). There were many Legends of Celgene like Shawn who moved on to prosperity. I learned a lot from Shawn and seeing her work—I hope she knows how much I still admire her grit, success, and Blue Collar Ohio Mentality when it comes to Work, Mentorship, and Phamily (Pharma Family).

My path to Summit was forged far from New Jersey pharma. After graduating from Northwestern University a few years before with an Honors GPA in Computer Engineering—essentially a degree in systems engineering based on how I approached school (as a job) —I cut my teeth working in Chicago Consulting as a data migration / early-AI expert for Premier International. I understood database logic, data architecture, and technical execution down to the metal. From 2009 to 2011, I applied those skills to the federal defense sector while working under a Secret Security Clearance. It was high‑stakes analytical, but the Bureaucracy was Stifling. I wanted an industry that moved with speed, where engineering precision had immediate human impact. Healthcare was the natural progression.

I relocated to New Jersey in March 2010, spending just over a year in general biopharma operations consulting out of Princeton. The work was demanding, the hours long, and the exposure to early immunotherapy platforms convinced me that a massive wave of cancer treatment was on the horizon. I knew I had to work for a cancer firm.

When the recruiter - Shawn O'Rourke ~ some Yale graduate from Colorado ~ called in June 2011, I knew I had to take the leap. Celgene was growing desperate; their analytical insights were stalling because nobody could construct the analytical architecture required for hematology, their blood cancer portfolio which Marketing and Leadership had too many questions to answer. .

When I informed my consulting firm that I was leaving, they panicked. They offered a corporate golden ticket: stay, and they would

guarantee my spot at a top‑tier business school—a $300,000 MBA path. Simultaneously, a larger pharma client tried to recruit me for a higher‑ranking Manager role. I turned both down. I preferred Celgene’s sharp focus on high‑unmet‑need malignancies, and I respected the team at Summit. I chose raw hustle, equity options, and the pressure cooker. I really like Max Kosoy, my first boss, his boss Kevin Sweeney, and all I interviewed with: Mary Kiefer, Stephen "The Sleeve" Greeley, and Virginia "Mom Boss" Krause. 

In August 2011, I officially joined Celgene Corporation in Summit and then reported to the 300 Connell Building in Berkeley Heihts as a Senior Analyst of Sales Operations - Marketing Support. It was a life‑changing pivot—one that placed me directly inside the engine for the most lucrative, reckless, and catastrophic decade in biopharma history.

When I arrived, Celgene was undergoing a fundamental shift in corporate identity. The foundation had been shaped by co‑founder Sol Barer, a brilliant scientist who ran the company like an academic lab that had struck oil. Under Sol, the dogma was that “the clinical data spoke for itself.” Unfortunately Sol was wrong and the stock had flatlined.

Sol was stepping back as the company outgrew its scientific origins, and Bob Hugin was taking control as the New CEO. Joining in 1999 as a former Marine officer with a Princeton University undergraduate degree and a Darden MBA, Hugin brought Wall Street discipline to Summit. Clinical data and Financially Growth should no longer simply “speak”—it had to be weaponized for strategic execution, field force alignment, and market dominance. Hugin was a disciplined strategist who knew how to raise billions, maintain capital metrics, and lead a Spartan, Wall Street-like operational culture. 

I stepped into the building just as Bob Hugin took over. My mandate: take ownership of Celgene’s data architecture, integrate all tumors into a true commercial engine, and redesign the analytics powering Celgene’s growth.

Over the coming years, I became the primary architect of those analytical systems for US Commercial at Celgene which drove the majority of the company’s revenues—the de facto data and AI lead long before the term became corporate currency. Yet as my scope grew, I turned down offers to transition into Business Development Analytics three separate times. Watching the deal desk operate, I saw that without financial disciplinarian Jackie Fouse steering capital allocation, BD was becoming addicted to high‑risk option‑hoarding rather than balance‑sheet rigor.

From the outside, Celgene looked unstoppable. From the inside, early operational friction was evident. The legacy IT infrastructure was severely outdated. Standard data‑science tools like SAS, Python Coding, and Tableau were restricted or inaccessible until many years later. To deliver, I engineered custom solutions in legacy Microsoft Access using VBA and raw SQL —workarounds that saved millions in external consulting fees and rapidly elevated my standing within commercial operations. We were dragging the company into the modern computing era through sheer engineering force. We designed solutions From the Field, By the Field, and For the Field, as my dear friends Mary Kiefer, Bill Spruill , Eddie Dowling , and of course David Wedlake and Mouzetta Zumwalt-Weathers will recall. Maybe Bill Pawlik too. We'll see. 

Yet as revenue surged, corporate excess began to warp the culture from 2014 to 2019. Compliance‑mandated events transformed into alcohol‑fueled sprees even though the CEOs and CFOs and President of Hematology, Nadim Ahmed, did not drink given he is a devout Muslim. Redundant executive roles were created to absorb capital and reward insiders... but eventually eliminated quickly if they did not perform Up to Celgene Snuff. Celgene lost key operational lessons from its past as traditional “Big Pharma” executives flooded the organization, quickly overwhelming New Jersey’s constrained local talent pool. 

Outside the office, personal challenges mounted which led to my own personal discovery and positive growth. In 2012, I began therapy to navigate severe family adversity, including my big brother Sean’s struggle with addiction and subsequent state imprisonment in Ohio. That process of personal auditing built an unshakeable resilience—unlocking a clarity that proved essential then and guides me today as

a middle‑aged healthcare executive raising two sons and a German Shepherd rescued from a New Jersey nonprofit in Rockaway.

For ten and a half years—from August 2011 until I walked away in January 2022—I sat at the intersection of biopharma analytics and corporate strategy. I watched Celgene grow into a $100 billion titan at its peak share price in September 2017, witnessed the fatal leadership pivots that doomed its independence, and saw executive liquidation and desperation replace scientific discipline and True Business Development Rigor. 

Revlimid lost patent exclusivity in 2022, yet through complex generic legal agreements and contracts, prices for these legacy therapies remain artificially elevated. While patients face staggering financial hurdles and wait for next‑generation cell therapies, biopharma executive compensation continues to drive systemic healthcare inflation.

"Blood Money", my Celgene memoirs, is my literal autopsy of how that machine was built, how it decayed from within, and how a $74 billion buyout by Bristol Myers Squibb exposed the ultimate price of biopharma’s excess. 

What we pay in our modern era is just a Down Payment for the Future - our Children. We can build a better one if we rethink what we spend on American HealthCare, why we spend it, and why health outcomes stagnate or worsen for the wealthiest country in human history.

2014: The Final CELG Split & Charlie Arrives

2014 was the year everything tilted for the better—the year Celgene changed, the year I matured, the year the cracks began to show in Celgene's foundation after the Company's final stock split, and the year I finally understood what it meant to do the next right thing and become an Uncle even when the world around you was spinning.

It was the year of the final stock split, the first true organizational restructuring, the depth of falling in love, the profound joy of becoming an uncle, and the year I watched people I cared about graduate from the Cauldron—that intense Celgene pressure cooker that forged some of the sharpest leaders in biopharma. It was also the year a boss brought a baseball bat to work. But we will get there.

Celgene had been growing fast—far too fast. The company was still operating with the frantic energy of a scrappy oncology startup, but its revenue curve looked like a Fortune 50 rocket ship. We were a massive corporate titan pretending to be a middle-school science fair project, and something simply had to give.

That something arrived in the form of Marco, a former Swiss military officer and Johnson & Johnson executive. He walked into Summit with the calm, disciplined presence of someone who had seen real corporate warfare before and refused to be intimidated by our local chaos.

Like both Kevin and Nadim and Shawn, Marco did not raise his voice, posture, or need to micromanage. He understood systems, he understood people, and he understood that Celgene needed a Commercial Operations function that actually matched the scale of its business.

For the old guard who had built Celgene on whiteboard scrawls, midnight coffee, and sheer adrenaline, Marco’s arrival was a cultural shockwave. It marked the exact moment scrappy Celgene Commercial Operations startup grit was forcibly replaced by Fortune 50 corporate machinery to better support our patients who were battling cancer.

The reorg began quietly—a few late-night executive meetings, tentative org charts circulated in secret, hallway whispers at 300 Connell—but by early 2014, the writing was on the wall: Celgene was continuing to rebuild itself, and bureaucratizing the operational backbone we had improvised.

Amidst that seismic structural shift, I had been promoted to Manager of Commercial Operations at the end of 2013. It was the first time I felt truly respected given how much sweat equity and maturity it required.

After years of building early data engines, automating REMS analytics, and trying to drag Celgene into modern computing through sheer engineering force, leadership finally acknowledged that analytics was not a nice-to-have luxury. It was infrastructure, strategy, and the future—and they invested in us.

Reorgs create movement, and 2014 was defined by it as people I cared about all Graduated from the Cauldron and moved into roles fitting their strengths and ambitions.  It became pretty clear to our Executive Leadership that we needed to invest heavily in our Information Technology department after I struggled to get anything done for nearly 2 years.  Kevin left to lead important projects as a Senior Director in IT and improve the entire company’s data analysis potential  - eventually he won significant investments from our CEO Mark Alles to try and help Celgene evolve “into the big data age”.

Steve and Max both interviewed for and were hired as Hematology Oncology Consultants in New Jersey, proving that Celgene’s culture could elevate anyone who worked hard and genuinely cared about patients, regardless of whether they fit the traditional sales rep stereotype - both of them thrived in the field for CELG and moved on to other roles as their developmental interests shifted.

I had a new boss in “Flip” (a pseudonym, of course) - a nice guy who was newly engaged to someone at the company. Flip was an Introvert like Me.  Flip  was an excellent musician with two cats, and we got along well.  We hired a colleague of his from Kansas to replace Steve who did great work for a couple of years before moving onto the field.  While a number of people had graduated (or left Sales Operations) as we were rebranded into Commercial Operations to reflect our growing partnership with the Overall Structure and relocated from 300 Connell in Berkeley Heights to Summit in late 2013.

To replace Kevin as Senior Director, Shawn tapped one of her most trusted confidantes from the field: Andrew, who had worked with her in Sales Operations at Genentech and was one of the Abraxane Regional Sales Directors. He lived about an hour from the office and was both an experienced Pharmaceutical Executive, a budding football coach, and a father of three kids about my age - two boys and a daughter whom he lovingly called “Goose”.  I did not realize it then, but leadership realized that I and most of Sales Operations were former athletes - so hiring people like Andrew who believed in coaching was key.  Andrew, Flip, Anthony, Mary, Sheline, Virginia, and I had some very interesting team meetings on Hematology.

Andrew had started winning me over at the 2013 POA, when he told me “that he had heard good things about me” - which is New Jersey parlance for, “Jeff M and Shawn told me you’re smart”.  When he joined us in 300 Connell as ‘the new Sheriff in Marco’s town’ - which was hilarious, and HR condemned him for - Andrew took one glance at my work.  He then told me: “Jeff… do you realize you saved Celgene MILLIONS in consulting fees?”

I told him: Yes, Yes I did. But Andrew did not realize how much that impressed me.  He was an Italian Stallian, alright.  A real Bruce Springsteen… Only he joked that he didn’t like Irish people (Andrew was a Yankees fan and kept an autographed Derek Jeter picture on his wall; I still don’t think he knows that Bruce Springsteen is half-Irish and half-Italian, AKA New Jersey’s “most common Catholic mix”.

Pete moved on to Novo Nordisk, making the right choice for his young family to ease a brutal commute and support his family closer to Princeton.  I miss Pete; he invited me to Thanksgiving in 2012 when he knew I was dealing with some family difficulties (Grandpa Andy’s death and Sean’s incarceration caused me a deep depression).

I hope Pete and his daughters are doing very well.  I recall that he adopted them and “knew by the time that they were in first grade that they are way smarter than him”; I know the feeling whenever I hang out with my kids and their friends, these days.  This next generation of minds will do things we can not even comprehend. I’m so excited to find out what my kids will end up doing and try to support them closely while they are young.

Jill from the data team got engaged and left Celgene; she chose to focus on being a stay-at-home mom after an incredible journey from Patient Support to Data Management (Celgene was getting more intense as it matured as a company). Virginia kept leading the data department, with my dear friend Sheline reporting to her.  I think Virginia is still with “the firm”; Sheline moved on to Novartis after Celgene (AKA our “big Swiss brothers to the North”!).

Vic—the original Senior Analyst pioneer who paved the way on the original REMS analyses and Dose Modification views before I arrived and proved “Celgene needed more analytical firepower” before I was hired —was recruited into an incredible contracting role in Market Access. It was a year of movement, growth, and evolution, where people were not just leaving Celgene; We were Leveling up and “Graduating from the Cauldron” in order to both grow within the company and also help other departments mature in their understanding of our incredible data and how to best use it to support our cancer patients.

Finally, my close friend and mentor who had sales and market research experience on Abraxane - Jen M - moved over to lead our Solid Tumor Sales Operations and Analytics function.  Jen recruited her acolyte and my friend, Jessie T.  Jessie was a key hire for Sales Operations to grow and evolve: she had a Master’s Degree in Statistics and we had known each other at our prior consultancy before joining Celgene in 2011.  She had two kids and was bored in her old job, and we knew she could do more for Celgene under Commercial Operations.

Sales Operations needed More Statistical Brain Power, and Jessie had Plenty of it. I’m still glad she joined, even if she didn’t enjoy being my Direct Report in 2015 prior to the Hematology & Oncology merger in the US under Tom’s strong leadership.  I have not seen Jessie in over a decade; her husband is a lawyer, and she left for Bayer years ago.

So, while Commercial Operations lost Max and Steve to the field and Kevin to IT, we added Andrew directly from the Abraxane Sales Force, we recruited Jessie to add more statistical firepower (she had a SAS license and knew how to use it!), and we landed Jen M who had both a cunning instinct plus the “soft skills” needed to help the team rebrand ourselves.  Jen was also Craig P’s favorite employee as far as I or anyone could tell - she had sales experience, market research, and now was joining Commercial Operations - and she knew how to get work done.

The true test of our new team structure came in the brutal weeks leading up to the National Sales Meeting (NSM). The fight before the NSM was a high-pressure crucible of late-night scrambles, heated arguments in windowless conference rooms, and intense operational friction. We were re-engineering territory alignments, rep credit logic, and field target lists under tight deadlines while executive leadership demanded perfection. The old way of doing things—last-minute spreadsheet fixes and manual patches—was buckling under our rapid growth as a company.

Marco and the newly aligned team worked hard, pulling order out of complete chaos. We circled the wagons, absorbed the heat from anxious field directors and marketers who needed updates and data insights as quickly as we could offer them, and delivered a bulletproof operational framework before taking the stage. We proved that Commercial Operations was no longer a back-office utility, but the tactical command center holding things together.

That operational evolution was mirrored in corporate finance when Celgene executed its final stock split—a two-for-one split. In practical terms, if a share was trading around $160, it became $80, and owning 100 shares meant holding 200, leaving total portfolio value unchanged while halving the nominal price of future stock options and RSUs. Leadership did not sugarcoat the dilution; they told us honestly that this was the price of growth, and they were right, as Celgene’s stock soared from 2014 to 2017.

We had proven to senior leadership that analytics infrastructure mattered, and they rewarded us. Yet, the split served as a quiet, golden-handcuff trap. Doubling option counts created the psychological illusion of wealth creation, locking mid-level managers and directors into a quieter compliance. It kept everyone ‘handcuffed’ to their jobs in a way, ignoring the growing cultural cracks and pipeline vulnerabilities because our brokerage accounts kept compounding. It was a stark reminder that Celgene was no longer a scrappy startup fighting for survival—it was a full-fledged corporation, and corporations always protect the balance sheet first.

Looking outward at Business Development, 2014 proved to be a year of mixed bets that mirrored the company's broader trajectory. The Acceleron partnership for luspatercept (Reblozyl) required a $25 million upfront investment and yielded a blockbuster crown jewel with peak sales reaching $2.3 billion, proving Celgene could still pick winners when grounded in deep science.

Other BD deals yielded more modest or complicated results, such as the Sutro antibody-drug conjugate platform and a second Forma protein degradation deal. It was a microcosm of Celgene itself: brilliant bets that paid off alongside expensive early-stage gambles that evaporated into thin air, as a company tried to buy its future on Wall Street while simultaneously trying to build it internally. Celgene’s addiction to BD was quietly growing, and the cracks were starting to show, but the machine was generating so much cash that nobody wanted to stop the music.

Professionally, 2014 was the year I grew up; personally, it was the year I fell in love. Stacy was not just a girlfriend and future wife; she was the person who made New Jersey feel like home. Working as a psychiatric social worker meant her heart was in the right place and she grew up in Union County before eventually returning for her master’s degree in Social Work at Rutgers.

Stacy understood the Celgene mission, the pressure, and ultimately, she understood me. By 2014, I knew she was the one. We spent weekends in Morristown, sharing dinners with her family and quiet nights talking about life and the future, warmly welcomed by her mother-in-law Linda and her aunt MaryJo as though I had always belonged.

Then, at the end of the year, Charlie was born—Stacy’s niece, the daughter of her sister and Stacy's brother-in-law Jon (whom I admired like few others in life). Charlie was an angelic little baby and deeply loved. The moment I held her—this tiny, 6-pound miracle who felt light as a feather—it struck me with visceral clarity.

While I spent my days inside Celgene analyzing spreadsheets designed to squeeze maximum yield out of specialty pharmacy pipelines and commercial operations spreadsheets, here was pure innocence. Charlie instantly established herself as an important anchor of our lives, a living reminder of what truly mattered, and someone for whom I desperately wanted to be a role model.  She was one adorable baby.

Every company has its legends, and Celgene was no exception, though few could rival the sheer, unhinged drama of the baseball bat incident. My Boss Flip, a brilliant and intense boss who was dealing with immense personal pain and suffocating pressure inside the Summit pressure cooker, finally snapped when he discovered a colleague named Stew was having an intimate relationship with his fiancée, who also worked at the company.

In a raw demonstration of His Masculine Rage - some would call it a breakdown, but most Men call it a Passion to Protect the Woman you Love - Flip brought a wooden baseball bat to the garage looking for Stew. Celgene’s Security Intervened. 

It was the ultimate, terrifying proof of how unmanageable the burnout and psychological stress inside Celgene had become—where personal lives and corporate pressure collided until the structural seams burst open.

Flip then took twelve weeks of medical leave on the company dime (At Full Pay!), returned as if nothing had happened but with his Depression + Anger well managed, and in a twist of surreal workplace irony, was briefly managed by me before the 2016 reorg. Flip was smart. Flip Earned a Lot of Respect by bringing a Bat to Work.

He eventually quit Celgene voluntarily in 2017 to travel the world. It was an impressive move born of human suffering and depression, and a blunt reminder that even inside a $100 billion oncology machine, the people driving the gears are fragile and human.  Flip, like me, was a big white guy with a beard who was not from NJ with a sensitive soul.

Now, as a man who was newly in love with Stacy… I still Respect Flip for sticking up for himself and his fiancee, even if a bit overboard with bringing a baseball bat to the office to beat up the guy (who, frankly, deserved it if he knew she was engaged), and also for leaving Celgene on his own terms.

To add a final touch of absurdity to the era, shortly after Stacy and I saw “The Wolf of Wall Street”, I received a cold call on my cell phone from an investment guy named Jordan B. He sounded just like a young Leonardo DiCaprio trying to pitch me penny stocks and financial garbage.

I hung up immediately and laughed my ass off in my cube, but it was one of those surreal moments that captured the spirit of 2014—a world where corporate excess, wild finance, and unbelievable reality walked hand in hand.

My lesson from 2014 was that life does not necessarily get easier, but it does get clearer—and better. You do not control corporate reorgs, BD gambles, stock splits, baseball bats, heartbreak, or the unpredictable chaos of the future. You only control yourself: What is the Next Right Thing to Do?fwfwwfwfw

In 2014, I focused on doing just that: I worked hard, loved deeply, supported my team, grew professionally, became an uncle, became a better man, and stayed fiercely loyal to the mission, the patients, and the people who mattered. 

It was not a flawless year, but it was deeply formative. It was the year Celgene matured, when I fell deeper in love, and everything tilted back in the best possible way.

2018: The Year Everything Changed: Jon went to Heaven, We became Pregnant at Celgene, and I worked on Becoming a Father

There was a strange, hollow expanse to the calendar year 2018.

When you look back at it across the expanse of time—standing now in October of 2026, with two sons shouting down the hallway and the graying temples of a man who has survived corporate warfare, profound personal ruin, and the slow-grinding gears of life—2018 looks less like a year and more like a car crash caught in slow motion. It was not a good year. It was a Mess of a Year. It was not a triumphant year. It was an epoch of absolute fracture. It was the twelve-month crucible where everything I thought I was, everything I had built at Celgene, and everything I understood about the universe was systematically taken apart, hammered on an anvil, and reassembled into something entirely unrecognizable.

For the longest time, I barely remembered the sequence of it. The days bled together into a gray, suffocating smear of hospital fluorescent lighting, commuter trains crawling out of Basking Ridge toward Summit, silent kitchen tables, and the relentless, gnawing background radiation of grief. The human brain, in its mercy, builds scar tissue over the worst of its trauma much like the CTE that has left portions of my forebrain scarred but not permanently damaged... I hope... leaving only jagged monuments behind. The monuments of 2018 are etched into my soul like so much acid: Jon’s death in April, our pregnancy swelling against the backdrop of an uncertain future, the final, pathetic spasms of Celgene’s business development engine, the vultures circling the Summit headquarters, and the terrifying, beautiful, ego-shattering realization that my own life was no longer about me.

Jonathan Lawlor of Bucknell University, Castleton Commodities International, a dear friend of Portugal's Miguel Simoes and many others, and New Providence School District's Eagle Scout became God's Latest Angel on April 10th, 2018, just one week before his thirty-seventh birthday. Thirty-seven (37). To a man approaching forty-three (43), thirty-six is a young man; it is a long hike, many eggs and apples and cups of coffee, the prologue of a life. But Jon was gone. He died quietly, painfully, bravely, travelling as the hospice nurse put it, and with the kind of dignity and peace that makes people like me feel smaller. He was my Chosen Big Brother-in-Law, but he was more than that—he was the anchor of our family, the steady hand on the tiller, the electrical engineer from New Providence High School and Bucknell University and then a great company in Connecticut who saw the equations of the world with crystalline clarity. He loved Shakespeare’s timeless verse, the grit and glory of the New York Yankees through every summer, and the honest, piano-driven truth of Billy Joel records spinning in the quiet hours. He loved his daughter Charlotte and his entire family with a ferocious, unfiltered, yet gentle devotion. When Charlotte was born, Jon understood instantly and completely that his own ego had expired. He knew without being told that he no longer mattered. His purpose was her. His breath was hers.

His future was hers.

I didn’t understand that truth when it happened. Not really. Not in my bones. I was too green emotionally. I was not yet a father myself—just a young Fun Uncle who had a niece that had just received an unimaginable void where her True Father should have stood due to colorectal cancer. I was too busy fighting the louder battles of the corporate suite, too obsessed with the metrics of biopharma analytics, too trapped in the delusion that my professional survival, my personal horsepower, and my battle-scarred pride were the center of gravity. It took the combined weight of Jon’s casket sinking into the Ohio earth and the miraculous, terrifying heartbeat of an unborn son to finally shatter the stained glass of my self-absorption.

The months immediately following Jon’s funeral were utterly surreal. I went back to work because big strong people like us don't know how to do anything else; we put one foot in front of the other because the mortgage doesn't care that your heart has been ripped out of your chest. I went back to Celgene Corporation, our brand new L building in Summit. I went back to the building where the golden era had already curdled into corporate panic. Nobody needed to pull me into a conference room and whisper secrets; I didn’t need an insider memo to know the writing was on the wall. We were too cheap, our pipeline was too erratic, and our desperation was bleeding through the floorboards.

The larger biopharma sharks were circling Summit, and the blood-favored water was finally turning beet red in New Jersey.

If you want to understand why Celgene Pharma got bought, you have to look at the structural rot of its final years—the desperate, multi-billion-dollar bet-hedging that we chronicled in the ledgers of Appendix A. The BD deals executed between 2012 and 2018 were supposed to be the salvation of the company, the magical pipeline extensions that would rescue us from the impending Revlimid patent cliff. Instead, they became a monument to executive terror. Celgene had burned through $22.8 billion in upfront cash and equity across those six years, committing over $41.5 billion in headline deal values while managing to produce a paltry $18.6 billion in actual FDA-approved assets. The rest was a graveyard of ambition, a fiscal wasteland where shareholder capital went to die.

I lived through the autopsy of those deals in real-time. I watched Receptos, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Celgene acquisition: a staggering $7.2 billion bet—produce the humiliating, catastrophic FDA Refusal-to-File disaster for what was then known as ozanimod, a debacle that signaled to the entire Street that our regulatory intelligence was asleep at the wheel. I watched the $1.1 billion upfront poured into Impact Biomedicines shrivel into a ghost town as Inrebic choked on a black-box warning and crashed against the hard rocks of commercial reality. I watched the $710 million Nogra partnership for Mongersen implode in Phase III trials, turning a supposed savior compound into expensive medical waste. The OncoMed partnership at $3.3 billion cratered; the Jounce deal evaporated into thin air; Prothena, Forma, Acetylon—they all vanished like morning mist under the harsh sun of clinical failure.

Celgene had stopped playing the long, disciplined game of organic scientific discovery. It had devolved into a corporate empire trying to brute-force innovation through checkbook diplomacy, throwing billions of dollars at unproven platforms simply to generate press releases that would keep the stock price stable for one more quarter. It wasn’t strategy; it was a coping mechanism. It was management hiding under the bed covers, praying that the bogeyman of the Revlimid patent expiration would magically go away if they bought enough shiny biotech toys.

And in 2018, the bill finally came due on Celgene's down payment with sudden hidden interest.

The executives from Bristol Myers Squibb didn’t even try to hide their astonishment and quiet fury as they peeled back the hood during the Acquisition Due Diligence (ADD... not the AuDHD & CTE that I Got ;). They had agreed to shell out $74 billion for an enterprise built entirely on a decaying foundation, only to discover that our panic-driven shopping spree had saddled them with billions of dollars in high-priced, underperforming baggage. The infamous CVR—the Contingent Value Right designed as a clever financial parachute—was already being eyed by Wall Street sharpshooters as an unpayable gamble, destined for the executioner's block to save BMS $6.4 billion. The then pipeline drug known as Breyanzi® (lisocabtagene maraleucel) HCP had manufacturing deadlines which were slipping into manufacturing purgatory. The early-stage pipeline was a smoking ruin; the late-stage pipeline was wheezing under the strain.

Celgene was being sold. Celgene was being absorbed. Celgene was being digested and erased from the corporate map. And as I sat at my desk watching the empire fold in upon itself, a strange, luminous peace washed over me.

For the first time in my life, I realized something simple, terrifying, and completely liberating: I no longer mattered.

This wasn't the nihilism of a beaten man, nor was it the cynical detachment of a corporate casualty. It was something entirely different—it was the exact spiritual awakening Jon had tried to hand me without ever opening his mouth. When you are staring down the barrel of fatherhood while your brother lies six feet under and the company that defined your adult life dissolves into a merger-and-acquisition footnote... your career as you knew it dies a painless and permanent death, aside from what you and your colleagues remember and your resume. Your frantic ambitions quiet down. Your desperate need to control the narrative evaporates. Your identity shifts away from your title, your salary, and your stock options (non-qualified or otherwise), anchoring itself entirely into the lives of those who come after you. Stacy was carrying our child. Jon was gone. Celgene was vanishing. And Elliott was on his way down the track.

What follows a realization like that is not passivity; it is clarity. With my personal vanity stripped away, I moved through the rest of 2018 with absolute, ice-water-in-the-veins focus. I settled the scores that needed settling—the professional and personal debts that had lingered too long in the shadows, requiring closure before a new era could begin. I protected the loyal people who deserved protection from the incoming corporate bloodbath, and I ruthlessly cut loose the false friends who just wanted boring money.

I invested prudently and saved aggressively because a parent does not have the luxury of financial recklessness when mouths are waiting to be fed. I took care of the new house from top to bottom, getting things set up as best I could—CTE and all—because a child was coming and his nursery—and Stacy's Nest, as my Rugby Playing buddy Matt Hagan once put it (Matt never met Stacy but he is a Christian and father of three who plays rugby and turned Istodax around - with my and CELG's deep influence - in 2014)—had to be a fortress against the cold world. I walked Ainsley four miles every single day through the crisp autumn leaves of Basking Ridge because the dog didn't care about stock prices or corporate buyouts; he only cared about the rhythm of the leash and the sound of my voice. And mostly, I waited.

When Evvy, our little Eliotte, was finally born, the universe clicked into its proper alignment.

He came into the world with blue eyes that stopped me dead in my tracks—the exact, unmistakable eyes of my brother Jon... it still inspires me when he looks at me and tells me how it is, just like Jon did. My baby's eyes are calm, honest, steady, and terrifyingly observant. When he opened them and looked at me eventually, he didn't look like a screaming infant; he looked like an old soul checking to see if I was finally paying attention. He looked at the chaos of the world the way Jon had always looked at it: with deep, unshakeable curiosity instead of reactive fear, with gentle grace instead of desperate ego, with absolute clarity instead of corporate static.

And then, as the years rolled forward, came Logan-San —the second son, the chaos twin (the Thor to Eliot's Loki... much like Jon was Loki to me, and Sean was too... until we lost Sean decades before Charlotte was born), the fierce little bolt of lightning who carries my own fire, my stubborn humor, my relentless intensity, and my unyielding spark. Erverette... I mean Eliot! is Jon’s living legacy, carrying forward the steady, noble engine of a gentle, brilliant soul who left us all too soon. Logan is my little shadow, testing every boundary and forcing me to confront every flaw in my own nature. Charlie remains the beautiful, shining bridge between these two distinct worlds, holding our extended family together with the fierce love her father instilled in her. I hear she is doing well. I pray for all my kids, every day, just like Grandpa Andy taught me to.

That is how 2018 ends in the true ledger of my life. It does not end with Celgene’s $74 billion buyout announcement. It does not end with the pathetic wreckage of Celgene's mostly failed BD deals or the multi-billion-dollar write-downs. It does not end with the sharks circling Summit, the stock tickers flashing red, or the toxic culture of a dying corporate giant.

This chapter ends with a birth far more important than my own. It had started tragically with Jon's death. Thus, the CE year of 2018 continued with a brutal, beautiful paradigm shift.

Jon left this world so that we could learn how to truly inhabit it without the smartest person I ever met... the big brother I needed for my Electric quantum magnetism (my EQM), if you will. Elliot entered it to show me what actually matters. And I—the man forged in the fires of Celgene’s golden age, broken by grief, schooled by brilliant mentors, hardened by corporate betrayal, and saved by faith and fatherhood—finally understood the foundational secret of existence:

You no longer matter. Your children do. And that realization is the beginning of everything.

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