Calistoga Builds Cancer Drug Strategy, Hires First CEO, Carol Gallagher
Summary
The Seattle biotech company, which raised its founding $21 million round in March 2007, is announcing today it has hired its first CEO, Carol Gallagher, an executive who led the Rituxan oncology team at Biogen Idec when it crossed the $1 billion mark in sales.My goals were to find out what kind of situation Gallagher is entering at Calistoga, who she is, and how she plans to steer this company so it can someday come up with another hit drug like Rituxan for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.Calistoga got its start in 2006, when Gallatin obtained a license to technology that his former employer, Icos, had left on the shelf while it put its resources into marketing the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis.“That’s unusual for a cancer drug,” Gallagher says, because usually they are too toxic to be given to healthy people just to measure things like how well it distributes in the body, how long it lasts, and what side effects it causes.Gallagher says she enjoys digging into the science of the company, and that she was attracted to work with a management team full of people who have the experience of taking a drug through trials all the way to the market.