Terry Ragon is convinced that by bringing together leading doctors, scientists and engineers, he can do what major governments have to date didn’t do: He can cure considered one of the world’s most insidious viruses.
From Katie Jennings, Forbes contributor
IIt is the opening day of the brand new constructing of the Ragon Institute, a gleaming 30,000-square-foot glass and steel constructing on Main Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Governor Maura Healey, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and former and current presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Mass General Brigham sip lemonade and nibble hors d’oeuvres. A chorus of a dozen scientists and staff members break into “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” All are there to toast Phillip “Terry” Ragon, the billionaire founding father of the software company InterSystems, and his wife, Susan, also an organization executive. The Ragons have donated $400 million to research into using the immune system to fight disease. Soon, as a substitute of singing, these scientists shall be sitting on gleaming white and silver lab benches conducting experiments to cure considered one of the world’s most elusive viruses: HIV.
“We started developing the whole idea of a Manhattan Project on HIV,” Ragon, 74, says in a rare interview, referring to America’s massive research and development program to construct the primary atomic bomb during World War II. “If you had tried to do the Manhattan Project in World War I, you would have failed because we didn’t know anything about quantum mechanics. If you had waited until World War III, it would have been too late.”
Forbes 2014
Ragon, the only real owner of InterSystems, price an estimated $3.1 billion, believes – despite all evidence on the contrary – that we’re on the verge of the same scientific breakthrough relating to curing the estimated 39 million people worldwide living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
That’s slightly crazy. After all, massive organizations with much more resources than the Ragon Institute have been attempting to develop an HIV vaccine for many years. After years of trying and a $500 million commitment, Johnson & Johnson pulled the plug on its last large-scale effort, a vaccine based partially on the Ragon Institute’s research, in 2023. In total, governments, nonprofits and corporations have spent about $17 billion over the past twenty years developing an HIV vaccine, in response to the HIV nonprofit AVAC. Not a single one has made it past Phase 3 clinical trials. Ragon is undeterred, though. He says government funders typically evaluate research proposals not only on their importance, but additionally on the likelihood that the experiment will succeed. That never made sense to him. “You would expect most experiments to fail,” he says, which is why he believes his efforts, which concentrate on funding riskier, early-stage research, will succeed where larger players have failed.
Cambridge within the US state of Massachusetts is home to Harvard, MIT and the newly established Ragon Institute (above). It has the very best concentration of talented researchers on the planet, says Terry Ragon: “People talk about Silicon Valley, but it’s not like Cambridge.”
Jeremiah Jordan/DGA Productions
The need is great. In wealthy countries, HIV and AIDS have been largely contained through expensive drugs, but around 630,000 people still died from the disease in 2022, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. The United Nations estimates that ending the epidemic by 2030 could bring economic advantages of $33 billion per 12 months in low-income countries. According to the CDC, around 1.2 million Americans are HIV-positive; the lifetime treatment costs for everybody are around $420,000, in response to a 2021 study.
Ragon’s approach is to bring together scientists who don’t normally work together, including doctors, engineers, physicists, mathematicians and virologists. The goal is to revamp people’s immune systems so that they may be cured, which could have far-reaching implications for other diseases similar to tuberculosis, malaria and cancer. “I’ve learned more from my failures than from my successes,” Ragon says. “And I think that’s true for science, too.”
In fact, Ragon’s decades-long business success was the results of failure in one other field: music. After graduating from MIT with a level in physics in 1972, Ragon packed up his guitar and moved to London—his British rock idols included Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck, and Cream—to develop into a rock star. But it didn’t work out. When he returned to Boston, desperate for a paying job, he noticed that job postings were stuffed with positions for computer programmers. After several failed interviews, he applied for a job at Meditech, considered one of the primary electronic health records corporations. “I really don’t know much about computers,” Ragon told the interviewer, looking up at a poster of Mick Jagger. “But I play guitar.” He got the job, which turned out to be a crash course in an early programming language often known as the Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System, or MUMPS.
After a 12 months and a half, Ragon left Meditech to co-found a medical billing company based on MUMPS. In 1978, he founded Interpretive Data Services, which he later renamed InterSystems. While other database management corporations like Oracle and SAP offered corporations a strategy to structure transactions into manageable rows and columns, Ragon took a likelihood on a distinct variety of database, coded in MUMPS and arranged like tree branches leading back to central trunks. It was fast and reliable, and was soon adopted by the Department of Veterans Affairs for medical records. InterSystems grew slowly: It took 24 years to achieve $100 million in revenue—fueled by its two biggest customers, the VA and electronic medical records company Epic Systems—and one other 21 years to achieve $1 billion in 2023.
Ragon stays optimistic that a cure for HIV shall be possible in his lifetime. This is partly because he’s taking a similarly methodical and long-term approach to constructing his software company. He is inspired by philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who once argued that science goes through long periods of slow evolution punctuated by radical revolutions, which Kuhn called paradigm shifts. “Every now and then,” Ragon says, “there’s something that just turns the world on its head.”
His personal paradigm shift got here during a hospital visit in South Africa on the invitation of Bruce Walker, an infectious disease researcher at Mass General and a professor at Harvard Medical School. It was 2007. InterSystems had just acquired an electronic health records company called TrakHealth, and Walker wanted to point out Ragon the software in motion. He remembers a frail young woman entering the examining room and the doctor pointing to a throbbing vein in her neck, an indication of heart failure. “I’m sitting there watching her die,” Ragon says, hearing the doctor ask if she believed in Jesus. “This would be a good time to make plans for how you will meet your Creator,” he remembers the doctor saying before releasing her onto the road. 4,000 women between the ages of 15 and 24 develop into infected with HIV every week, the UN estimates—3,100 of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Ragon knew he needed to do something.
When HIV enters the body, it hijacks our cellular machinery to pump out recent copies of the virus. Unlike Covid or measles, HIV inserts instructions directly into the DNA code, meaning the human host is forced to make copies of the virus so long as it lives. It can be “extraordinarily variable,” says Daniel Kuritzkes, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, meaning “every person has a virus that is slightly different from another.” [that of] one other person.” The combination of those two properties makes it extremely difficult to develop an efficient vaccine.
To defeat considered one of nature’s most resilient viruses, researchers on the Ragon Institute are taking inspiration from an incredible and rare natural phenomenon: individuals who have HIV but don’t have any symptoms and essentially cannot spread the virus. Their T cells, called “elite controllers,” are extremely effective at attacking and killing the virus. Walker, the founding director of the Ragon Institute, first encountered an elite controller within the Nineties and has been attempting to unlock the secrets of such patients’ immune systems ever since. “If we could achieve that state in infected people,” Walker says, we’d have a “functional cure.”
In 2025, Walker goals to start Phase 1 clinical trials of a brand new T-cell-based vaccine designed to mimic a phenomenon in elite controllers by which the body attacks amino acids critical to the structure of the virus. Partners within the project include the Gates Foundation, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and Italian drug developer ReiThera. Will it work? “We’ve been wrong so many times, and maybe we’re wrong here too,” Walker says.
Fifteen years ago, “about half of the scientists said it was impossible to develop a vaccine,” says Ragon. Will there be a cure for HIV in his lifetime? He is definite: “Yes.”
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