Kevin McKernan

And it turned out shortly after I did maybe a nine or 10-month stint at a company doing pharmaceutical marketing, I decided I want to get back to the bench and luckily got into the Human Genome Project up in Cambridge at MIT. my resume ended up on Trevor Hawkins desk from two different people at once. Um, for some bizarre reason, he hired me.

And, um, the guys who hired me a year later who were running that group were also MIT grads. And there's this thing in MIT that if you're still at MIT a year, if you graduate, you're kind of still in your mom's basement. Uh, and so they decided they had to leave and they left the reins to me. And I started running the research and development program there.

And, um, the guys who hired me a year later who were running that group were also MIT grads. And there's this thing in MIT that if you're still at MIT a year, if you graduate, you're kind of still in your mom's basement. Uh, and so they decided they had to leave and they left the reins to me. And I started running the research and development program there.

And, um, the guys who hired me a year later who were running that group were also MIT grads. And there's this thing in MIT that if you're still at MIT a year, if you graduate, you're kind of still in your mom's basement. Uh, and so they decided they had to leave and they left the reins to me. And I started running the research and development program there.

Um, as that scaled up and raced against Craig mentor and, uh, So, we built a really vast DNA sequencing pipeline at the Whitehead, and through the course of that, we discovered various new ways of isolating DNA, patented those, and as the Human Genome Project came to close, a bunch of pharmaceutical companies started asking, like, how do we license this stuff?

Um, as that scaled up and raced against Craig mentor and, uh, So, we built a really vast DNA sequencing pipeline at the Whitehead, and through the course of that, we discovered various new ways of isolating DNA, patented those, and as the Human Genome Project came to close, a bunch of pharmaceutical companies started asking, like, how do we license this stuff?

Um, as that scaled up and raced against Craig mentor and, uh, So, we built a really vast DNA sequencing pipeline at the Whitehead, and through the course of that, we discovered various new ways of isolating DNA, patented those, and as the Human Genome Project came to close, a bunch of pharmaceutical companies started asking, like, how do we license this stuff?

We need to import this stuff into our facilities. We spun out a company in called. And what was the purpose of the human genome?

We need to import this stuff into our facilities. We spun out a company in called. And what was the purpose of the human genome?

We need to import this stuff into our facilities. We spun out a company in called. And what was the purpose of the human genome?

All right. So, yeah, I'll back up on that. So we wanted the whole. It was really this is an important history, actually, that you cover. I'm glad you asked. So the goal back then in the dream and how it was sold to the American public.

All right. So, yeah, I'll back up on that. So we wanted the whole. It was really this is an important history, actually, that you cover. I'm glad you asked. So the goal back then in the dream and how it was sold to the American public.

All right. So, yeah, I'll back up on that. So we wanted the whole. It was really this is an important history, actually, that you cover. I'm glad you asked. So the goal back then in the dream and how it was sold to the American public.

it was really um ironically through francis collins who we'll probably get to later and the pitch there was we want to go to personalized medicine we want to sequence everyone's genome figure out their differences and and drug them accordingly instead of this let's build one drug test it on 10 000 people and and send it across the entire globe and hope it works right the idea was no we're going to get more precision about this we're going to actually when you have cancer sequence your genome and then sequence the the genome of your tumor which will be different in most cases

it was really um ironically through francis collins who we'll probably get to later and the pitch there was we want to go to personalized medicine we want to sequence everyone's genome figure out their differences and and drug them accordingly instead of this let's build one drug test it on 10 000 people and and send it across the entire globe and hope it works right the idea was no we're going to get more precision about this we're going to actually when you have cancer sequence your genome and then sequence the the genome of your tumor which will be different in most cases

it was really um ironically through francis collins who we'll probably get to later and the pitch there was we want to go to personalized medicine we want to sequence everyone's genome figure out their differences and and drug them accordingly instead of this let's build one drug test it on 10 000 people and and send it across the entire globe and hope it works right the idea was no we're going to get more precision about this we're going to actually when you have cancer sequence your genome and then sequence the the genome of your tumor which will be different in most cases

and see if we can find druggable differences that will kill the tumor and not kill the patient. And some of those started to occur in that timeframe. There was one drug called Orissa that was specific to, it failed as a drug until they discovered, I think it was Dan Haber up at MGH that did this and Matthew Myerson, Dana Farber.

and see if we can find druggable differences that will kill the tumor and not kill the patient. And some of those started to occur in that timeframe. There was one drug called Orissa that was specific to, it failed as a drug until they discovered, I think it was Dan Haber up at MGH that did this and Matthew Myerson, Dana Farber.

and see if we can find druggable differences that will kill the tumor and not kill the patient. And some of those started to occur in that timeframe. There was one drug called Orissa that was specific to, it failed as a drug until they discovered, I think it was Dan Haber up at MGH that did this and Matthew Myerson, Dana Farber.

They discovered that if you took that drug and actually looked at people's EGFR receptors, there was like a 15 base pair insert, a deletion inside that gene that if you had it, the drug worked. And if you didn't, it did not work. So the drug failed on population-wide. But if you isolated the people and sequenced them first, you had remarkable success rates with the drug.