NEW: Ramaswamy Hired His Mother to “Massage Data” in “Pump-and-Dump” Pharma Scheme That Made Him Nearly $260 Million

NEW: Ramaswamy Hired His Mother to “Massage Data” in “Pump-and-Dump” Pharma Scheme That Made Him Nearly $260 Million

New reporting from Oligarch Watch reveals how Vivek Ramaswamy “served as the frontman for a dubious pharmaceutical company and then cashed out weeks before its dramatic crash.”

Ramaswamy reaped nearly $260 million from a company that he “used to buy the rights to an inauspicious Alzheimer’s drug that had repeatedly failed in clinical trials.” Then, he hired his mother — who “appears to have never conducted a clinical trial before or during her time at Axovant” — to “massage data from old clinical trials to make the drug appear more promising.”

“Pathological scammer Vivek Ramaswamy continues to show at every turn that there’s no low he won’t sink to if he thinks he can make a buck,” said DGA spokesperson Izzi Levy. “Ramaswamy will put himself and his bottom line first every chance he gets, no matter who pays the price, and Ohioans know they can’t afford him anywhere near the governor’s office.”

Oligarch Watch: How Vivek Ramaswamy’s mom manipulated Alzheimer’s data and made her son rich

• Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire and the Republican nominee in Ohio’s gubernatorial race, served as the frontman for a dubious pharmaceutical company and then cashed out weeks before its dramatic crash.
• In 2014, Ramaswamy founded Axovant, a company he used to buy the rights to an inauspicious Alzheimer’s drug that had repeatedly failed in clinical trials. Axovant then hired Ramaswamy’s mother, who, despite lacking relevant research experience, helped massage data from old clinical trials to make the drug appear more promising. The extent of the elder Ramaswamy’s role has not been previously reported.
• In 2015, touting his mother’s reinterpretation of the data to potential investors and regulators, Ramaswamy led Axovant to a $1.4 billion initial public offering, the largest in biotech history at the time. He spent the ensuing two years promoting the drug intepirdine as a possible breakthrough for the millions of Americans who have Alzheimer’s disease.
• Then, after structuring the company to insulate himself and other insiders from potential losses, he cashed out through a private back door weeks before another clinical failure cratered the stock price.
• Ramaswamy, whose gubernatorial candidacy has received tens of millions in combined financial backing from fellow right-wing billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Yass, and Bill Ackman, reaped an estimated $260 million from Axovant’s parent company.
• The Ramaswamy campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
• After the collapse of the Phase 3 trial, the value of Axovant shares held by the California State Teachers’ Retirement System fell from $1,228,000 to $68,000, per SEC filings. Axovant eventually rebranded to Sio Gene Therapies and lost 99.8% of its value before shuttering completely.
• Since winning the Republican nomination in the Ohio gubernatorial race, Ramaswamy has shied away from discussing his time in biotech, choosing instead to cast his business success story in more vague terms, noted David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati.
• “One of the defining questions of the campaign will be, are Ohioans talking about this in October — are they aware of how well he did, and how poorly most other folks did on that Alzheimer’s drug?” Niven said in an interview with Oligarch Watch.
• The basic reality of how Ramaswamy ran Axovant, Niven added, “was heads I win and tails I also win, in terms of the outcomes of the trials or whether the drugs actually proved useful or not.”

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