Show Notes
She started out as a small-town GP in South Africa with zero idea a "biotech industry" even existed. Three decades later, Deborah Dunsire had led the launch of Gleevec — the first targeted cancer therapy ever approved — steered Millennium Pharmaceuticals through an $8.8 billion acquisition, and run two more companies through drug failures, board showdowns, and billion-dollar bets. In this episode, she takes us inside the moments that don't make the press release: a phase one cancer patient still alive today, decades after a drug nobody thought would work; a multiple myeloma patient who happened to be trial patient #007 and was actually named James Bond; and the $60,000 milk-budget cut that nearly tanked employee morale company-wide.
Dunsire doesn't sugarcoat the hard parts either. She walks us through the gut-punch of watching a phase 3 trial fail just weeks after taking the CEO job at Lundbeck, the sleepless nights of shutting down a company at Forum Therapeutics, and a boardroom fight over share classes that got her booed by public shareholders. Through it all, one thread holds: her conviction that treating people with dignity — during layoffs, acquisitions, culture clashes across continents — isn't just the right thing to do, it's the thing that actually builds winning companies.
This is a masterclass in building biotech companies from someone who's done it inside Novartis, Millennium, Takeda, Forum, and Lundbeck — with the scars, the wins, and the hard lessons to prove it.
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