Meet Herriot Tabuteau – The Haitian Born-Doctor Whose Brain Disorder Medications Turned Into A $6 Billion Empire
When Herriot Tabuteau launched his drug development company, Axsome Therapeutics, in 2012, he decided to do things differently by focusing on treatments for brain disorders that are particularly challenging to develop. Now, he’s sitting on a $6 billion empire, according to Forbes.
The company is named after two parts of a nerve cell — the “axon” and the “soma” — with three drugs on the market and five up-and-coming drugs designed to help more than 150 million Americans suffering from brain conditions such as depression, ADHD, and Alzheimer’s disease. Tabuteau and his company faced pushback from investors after proposing a theory that building a portfolio on a single drug would reduce the risk of plans failing, while also keeping costs low.
“If you do things 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,” the 57-year-old physician said.
Outside of Axsome, a Phase III trial could easily have a price tag of $50 million, but Tabuteau could do it for 30% to 50% less. When the company first went public in 2015, there was a struggle. However, by 2025, Tabuteau’s research had resulted in the company trading on the Nasdaq with a market capitalization of $6.1 billion, making the Haitian-born doctor a billionaire.
Axsome Chief Financial Officer Nick Pizzie recalls a time when many people didn’t believe in the company, especially when the company’s stock fell below $10 for years and its market cap dropped under $100 million following the failure of an early drug for pain during clinical trials. But things changed when its first drug, Auvelity, a treatment for major depressive disorder, hit big and gained approval from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) in 2022.
Auvelity combines two existing medications for a treatment that starts to work in one week, in comparison to eight weeks of serotonin-based antidepressants. Shares for the company soared to 65% in a week, increasing Axsome’s value to $3 billion.
According to Business Insider, another one of Axsome’s medications, AXS-05, was labeled as a breakthrough for Alzheimer’s patients. It went to market in 2023, receiving rave reviews from advocates as there wasn’t one single approved drug to treat agitation — defined as extreme emotional distress that can lead to resisting care, shouting, or becoming physically violent — in Alzheimer’s patients. “This is a major problem,” leading Alzheimer’s researcher and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Dr. Jeffrey Cummings said.
“It is one of the principal reasons that Alzheimer’s patients are admitted to long-term care because they can’t be managed at home.”
Close to 6.2 million people are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, with roughly 70% experiencing agitation and 40% having severe enough symptoms to receive treatment.
With shares continuing to climb, reaching 35% to $122, outperforming the Nasdaq Biotech Index, Tabuteau and Axsome have no plans on stopping. The company is fighting to bring an antipsychotic medication to the market, which would be the only treatment available.
In the meantime, the plan for the Wesleyan and Yale School of Medicine-educated doctors is to reach $16.5 billion, which is already on track, projecting up to $3 billion in sales for Auvelity and another $3 billion from the Alzheimer’s agitation drug. The numbers show that there isn’t a risk too small when you see the potential. “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 said.
“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.”
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