{"href":"https://api.simplecast.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnucleate-signal.simplecast.com%2Fepisodes%2Fdeborah-dunsire-OJhafPgc","width":444,"version":"1.0","type":"rich","title":"Building, Breaking, and Rebuilding Biotech | Deborah Dunsire","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/ed52f7f3-cb55-48af-ae20-82bc5484ef83/a79cf5fe-a623-40da-8d8f-966d626b56de/youtube-20logo.jpg","thumbnail_height":300,"provider_url":"https://simplecast.com","provider_name":"Simplecast","html":"","height":200,"description":"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.\n\nDunsire 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.\n\nThis 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.\n"}