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Shiva Malek, head of oncology at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, discusses her drug development ambitions — including drugging transcription factors, tackling drug resistance and curing KRAS-mutant cancer.
When Shiva Malek was finishing her PhD in biochemistry and structural biology in the late 1990s, she didn’t plan on jumping into industry’s drug discovery trenches. But when an offer came in from Aurora Biosciences — founded by green fluorescent protein pioneer and to-be Nobel Prize winner Roger Tsien — to develop new biophysical tools to study protein functions and to run high-throughput screens, she couldn’t pass it up. “It wasn't about going into industry; it was the really compelling scientific opportunity,” she recalls. “I valued merging that technology with fundamental basic biology.”