Meet Kite’s new boss

Christi Shaw, who until yesterday was the leader of Eli Lilly’s pharma business, will be next to lead the CAR-T pioneer (and Gilead Sciences subsidiary) Kite Pharma.

Shaw previously spent years at Novartis, running the company’s U.S. operation in the early days of the CAR-T business. And it was her experience with CAR-T, which has led to some dramatic results in deadly cancers, that brought her to Kite.

“I really felt like it touched my heart,” Shaw said in her first interview about the move. “And I’d like to get back to something that is transformational, an innovation that can cure cancer.”

While CAR-T has proved to be a wildly promising approach to treating cancer, it has yet to live up to some high financial expectations. Gilead bought Kite in 2017 for $11.9 billion. Yescarta, the company’s first CAR-T therapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, generated sales of $96 million in the first quarter of 2019, compared to $40 million in the first quarter of 2018.

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