In 2013, Ted W. Love — a former drug developer at Onyx, Genentech and elsewhere and cardiologist by training — came out of retirement to take on sickle cell disease. This inherited blood disorder, in which sickled red blood cells clump together, blocking blood flow and the delivery of oxygen through the body, afflicts nearly 100,000 people in the USA and millions more throughout the world. And yet, until recently, these patients have had few therapeutic options for preventing the organ damage, risk of stroke and severe pain associated with disease. Last year, as CEO of Global Blood Therapeutics, Love secured an FDA approval for his company’s voxelotor, a first-in-class anti-sickling agent that at last takes aim at the underlying pathophysiology of the disease. He spoke with Asher Mullard about the science of voxelotor, his hopes of being able to turn sickle cell disease into a quiescent condition and the FDA’s embrace of surrogate end points in more and more indications.