Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Saturday, October 11th.

Today on Forbes, this Haiti-born doctor built a $6 billion business developing drugs for depression

and Alzheimer's.

When Aereo Tabuto started a drug development company in 2012, he decided to do so differently. First, he'd focus

on brain disorders, treatments for which are notoriously difficult to develop and whose efficacy

can be hard to prove. And he'd be both CEO and the scientific founder, bringing to bear his

decades of experience investing in biotech startups and his medical training.

But he'd take no venture capital, self-funding with help from friends and family.

Speaking to Forbes during his first ever interview with a reporter about his company,

Aksum Therapeutics, Tabuto, who is 57 years old, says, quote,

If you do things exactly 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.

Named for two parts of a nerve cell, the axon and the soma,

axiom has come a long way from its beginnings

in a windowless three-desk office in New York's

Rockefeller Center, affectionately remembered as, quote, the broom closet. Today, it has three

drugs on the market, and five in the pipeline, with the potential to help the estimated

150 million Americans suffering from conditions like depression, ADHD, or Alzheimer's disease.

Revenue for the 12 months ended in June, reached $495 million, up 70% from the same period in

2024.

Axum is not yet profitable, booking a net loss of $247 million in that time.

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