Pearl Huang learned how important it is to choose the right drug modality for a target on the first project of her biopharma career. When she joined Merck & Co. as a biochemist in 1990, she was tasked with unravelling how the human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer — with an eye to small-molecule interventions. Despite rapid results, management shut the programme down to focus on a HPV vaccine. The savvy reprioritization decision made way for the worldwide rollout of Gardasil, and left a strong mark on Huang. “I realized that I was going to have to be intellectually flexible, to be willing to work on lots of things,” she says.
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Interviewed by Asher Mullard
Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
