Lau­ra Shawver on why she came back af­ter an $88M wind­fall; Mor­phoSys taps Am­gen vet as CCO

Lau­ra Shawver didn’t quite un­der­stand can­cer un­til she had it.

By that point, in 2006, she had al­ready been mak­ing on­col­o­gy drugs for over 15 years, a dyed-in-the-wool re­searcher who had ob­tained a PhD in phar­ma­col­o­gy be­fore re­train­ing her­self as a mol­e­c­u­lar bi­ol­o­gist in the heady pre-Dol­ly days of cloning. She knew all about tu­mors. She knew the genes that drove them and the drugs that halt­ed them. Her pre­vi­ous com­pa­ny, Sug­en, had se­quenced can­cers to de­vel­op suni­tinib, one of the first ki­nase in­hibitors.

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