Alexion Pharmaceuticals

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Soliris: Alexion Pharmaceuticals sells just one drug, and in the first six months of this year it pulled in global revenues of $1.1 billion, just a few hundred thousand dollars shy of what it generated for all of 2012 (and that was double what it sold in 2010). Alexion’s wonder drug, Soliris, was first approved by the FDA in 2007 for the treatment of a rare blood disorder; treatment of a second rare genetic disorder was added in 2011. The company attributes Soliris’s meteoric rise to more doctors around the world prescribing it for more of their patients – simple. —N.S.