Remembering Gilead’s John Martin, whose therapies saved ‘millions’

John Martin, the visionary leader who transformed Gilead from a fledgling antisense company into an antiviral company whose drugs turned HIV into a manageable condition and cured HCV, passed away Tuesday. He was 69.

“He is absolutely a giant of our space,” said Stelios Papadopoulos, chairman of Biogen Inc. (NASDAQ:BIIB). “He taught us how to tackle HIV. It was all of his vision. His thinking has led to where we are today, where we’ve transformed HIV AIDS from a sentence to death to a manageable chronic condition.”...