Susan Desmond-Hellmann
speaker
362 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Susan Desmond-Hellmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I can just see what this looked like. I'm making this up now. Yeah. Oh, God, we've got an LMD. You know what an LMD is. We got this lady from Lexington, Kentucky. She's in private practice, oncology, and we're stuck with her. Let's have her do drug safety on Taxol. We have this new drug and it's really busy. It looks like it might work. And so we'll put her on drug safety.
She can't hurt anything doing that.
I don't think that registered because there were so many people there who were very traditionally trained at NCI or at Yale or wherever they were. And they were traditionally trained in oncology. My experience in Kampala in Uganda didn't make an impact. But here's what was funny. Nick and I didn't have a statistician. As I told you, we just, the two of us went.
So we brought this little compact computer and all the SAS manuals. We didn't have a TV. We didn't have newspapers. We didn't have anything. So we taught ourselves how to do SAS programming. When I got to Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of the really interesting things about Taxol is it causes severe neutropenia, but it's short. It's like this short, severe neutropenia.
And so I wanted to study that because I thought it was really important in why people weren't really getting infections.
When I talked before about how few new chemo drugs there were, Taxol was one of the first new chemotherapy drugs. So Taxol is a product of the yew tree and it's a microtubule poison. It is, if you think about it coming from the yew tree and you think about sap, think about trying to dissolve sap in water and give that to a patient. That's plenty hard. The dissolving fluid that's given with Taxol
And we want to block that. So this was not just a good way to block cellular division, which is so important in cancer therapy. It's really important because it's very different than some of the old chemotherapy drugs. And if you're resistant to those old drugs, here you have a brand new mechanism of action. So that's a terrific thing. but it's not easy to dissolve it.
So the dissolving agents are like soap. They dissolve the Taxol. And when the National Cancer Institute tried to use it, some patients got severe allergic reactions from that, and they got scared and put it on the shelf. So Bristol-Myers Squibb went to the National Cancer Institute and said, you know, that drug might really be active. We're willing to carefully go back in the clinic and test it
and give people agents to counterbalance the allergic reactions and see if we can get away with it. So they did that and they got an approval in ovarian cancer, a brand new agent. Now, Taxol was really exciting because first ovarian and then breast cancer were these indications where we had not had new drugs or really any drugs that were active in the case of ovarian for a long time.
And because I was a safety person, I was really trying to understand and put into context all these safety issues so it was possible to safely treat patients with these drugs.
It had been approved for ovarian cancer when I showed up.
We're doing post-marketing surveillance on ovarian and putting together a U.S. submission and a European submission for breast cancer. So I started talking to the statisticians there about how I wanted them to program to get the data we needed for the safety label. And I'll never forget... the guy looking at me and saying, do you know how to do this?
I said, well, I had to learn in Uganda because I didn't have somebody like you, you know. So it was sort of funny that I was very happy to prove myself. It didn't bug me. It made me more feisty. Like, I'll show you I'm not underdosed in the kinds of things you need to do in this place. And by the way, I loved every minute of being at Bristol-Myers Squibb. They were pros at cancer drug development.
They were pros at monitoring safety. And I thought it was so much fun because you got to make drugs.
You had Merck. You had Novartis. I think Novartis was a combo of a couple. It was smaller, much smaller. And cancer was Bristol-Mars Squibb. I mean, they had made cisplatinum, carboplatinum. They had a lot of those drugs. And people who had made those drugs were still there. And I was really happy to learn from them. I felt very lucky to get to be around these folks who knew about Taxol.
So we got Taxol approved in the U.S. and in Europe for breast cancer. It became Bristol-Myers Squibb's number one drug. I became the project team leader for Taxol.
Too long. He really enjoys that story because he, like all good family stories, it gets embellished over the years. And he tells this story like, you should actually want her. You don't know this, but he's a good husband.
That's right. That's right. I'd be better at tennis. Yeah. I had more free time. But yeah, no, I think that's the thing that I love to mentor. I think it's really underrated to listen to students and hear what's on their minds. And I remind students about the role of serendipity. And I think I'm a poster child for the role of serendipity.
95.
Genentech's a really interesting company because it claims to be the first biotech company. There's some Cetus back and forth about that, but it was based on genetic technology. That's where the Genentech name came from. And what Herb and Bob, the co-founders of Genentech, wanted to do is kind of do a proof of concept that you could use genetic technology and make medicines.
Showing 81–100 of 362 · page 5 of 19
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