Kathy’s Work
Multiple Myeloma
Research Foundation (MMRF)
Kathy founded the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation with her identical twin sister Karen Andrews in 1998, soon after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and given three years to live. At the time, there were no new treatments in the multiple myeloma pipeline. Built like a biotech startup and run like a Fortune 500 business, the MMRF sought new business models to drive breakthrough science forward. First to build a collaborative tissue bank, first to sequence its cancer genome, and first to spearhead a clinical network that has conducted nearly 100 trials and helped launch 153 new drugs, the MMRF tripled the lifespan of patients diagnosed with multiple myeloma and transformed the way research is conducted across all cancers.
Harvard Business School (HBS)
Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator
In the fall of 2015, Kathy received a call from Harvard Business School’s (HBS) Dean Nitin Nohria. HBS had been gifted a $20M grant by Robert Kraft and the Kraft Family Foundation to accelerate precision medicine by building collaborations and business models that could drive the field forward. Kathy would now become a senior fellow and faculty cochair of the Harvard Business School Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator. At HBS, Kathy convened more than 300 thinkers, doers, and disruptors from across the healthcare ecosystem to create the Playbook for Cures, a guide for organizations across all disease states to accelerate cures.
Working Under
Three Presidents
Kathy was appointed by President George W. Bush to the National Cancer Advisory Board (NCAB), to President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group, and served as an advisor to the Biden Moonshot program. As part of Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group, she helped create a “vision for how to harness the advances in technology, scientific understanding, and participant engagement to develop a platform for precision medicine research.” She also helped develop a plan for “creating and managing a large research cohort with data and specimens that can be accessed by all researchers for studies to understand the variables that contribute to health and disease and ultimately translate that knowledge into treatments tailored to individuals.”
READ KATHY’S FULL BIO HERE