Venture capitalist and biotech entrepreneur/ovarian cancer survivor join forces to form The Clearity Foundation to help ovarian cancer patients find better treatments
By Arthur Lightbourn, Rancho Santa Fe Review, Oct 2, 2008
http://www.sdranchcoastnews.com/archives/rsf_archives/10.2_rsf.pdf
Rancho Santa Fe resident and venture capitalist Rachel Leheny didn’t bat an eye when she met Laura Shawver who was wearing an “under armor cap” to cover the fact that she was bald as a result of chemotherapy to combat her ovarian cancer.
“We totally just talked science and she made me feel so comfortable,” Shawver said. “I remember that. That was our first meeting, two years ago exactly. It was shortly after my first treatment when my hair had just come out and I had to shave my head.” As a result of their meeting, Leheny agreed to help Shawver form The Clearity Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit to help ovarian cancer patients take a proactive role in finding more effective and customized treatments for their cancers. “I thought,” Leheny said, “what a great idea because as this field [cancer research] evolves, it’s going to be a question of who owns the information and I think having the information in a not-for-profit foundation where it’s being used for the good of the patient rather than being used to get money for somebody is the right thing.” Board member Leheny and foundation founder/ovarian cancer survivor Shawver have extensive backgrounds in scientific research and business — and are acutely aware that more than 22,000 U.S. women are diagnosed each year with ovarian cancer and 15,000 women each year die from the disease which has no known cause.
But unlike other patient advocacy groups that focus on disease awareness, early detection and education, The Clearity Foundation is focusing on ending the era of “one-size-fits-all” treatment regimens by offering molecular profiling of an individual’s tumor and paying for the tests if a patient’s insurance does not cover the costs. Molecular profiling, more commonly used in the treatment of other cancers, creates a signature of an individual’s tumor and identifies a panel of proteins expressed by the tumor that may enable the cells to grow larger or spread to other parts of the body.
Armed with the profile information, oncologists can customize an ovarian cancer patient’s cocktail of drugs to include FDA-approved drugs used to treat other cancers or investigational medicines that can more effectively combat the individual patient’s tumor.
For the basic profiling test, the tumor sample is sent to a central lab and the results are sent back to the patient and her doctor for consideration of alternative treatments within 72 hours.
We interviewed the two proactive women at Leheny’s home in Rancho Santa Fe at an early morning meeting before each headed off to their respective day jobs.
Leheny, 45, and mother of two pre-teen sons, is a managing director and founder of the Caxton Advantage Life Sciences Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in late-stage private and micro-cap public biotech companies. A native New Yorker, Leheny was drawn to science early. Both her father and brother are physicists. She earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University. She headed the biotechnology research group at Lehman Brothers and was a senior biotech analyst at UBS and Hambrecht & Quist. She was named a Wall Street Journal All-Star Analyst in 1996, 1998 and 2002. No one in her family has ovarian cancer.
Shawver, 51, is the CEO of Phenomix Corp, a company developing drugs in areas of unmet medical needs including diabetes and hepatitis C virus infection.
An Iowa native, Shawver earned her undergraduate degree in microbiology and her doctorate in pharmacology from the University of Iowa.
Her professional focus is in cancer research and drug development. Prior to joining Phenomix, she was president of SUGEN, Inc., a company that identified molecular pathways of cancer cells. In 2006, Shawver was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Although she spent most of her professional life engaged in the research of various cancers, and realized one in three women eventually become cancer patients, still she was shocked when she was told she had early stage ovarian cancer.
“You never think it’s going to happen to us, but it does,” she said.
Ovarian cancer usually occurs in women over age 50, but it can also affect younger women. Even though her cancer was caught early and would very likely result in a surgical cure, she said, like most, she thought about the possibility of dying and ultimately developed a different perspective on life. But, initially and to her dismay, she quickly learned that the scientific innovations that were being applied to improve the treatment of other cancers were not benefiting patients with ovarian cancer primarily because pharmaceutical companies and researchers concentrate their money and resources on more prevalent cancers with larger patient populations.
At the time of her diagnosis, she searched but could not find a standard service to analyze her tumor’s profile, so she opted for the same treatment that ovarian cancer patients have received for more than four decades — surgery followed by a standard chemo cocktail.
Although the standard treatment is initially effective, most patients with advanced ovarian cancers relapse and do not respond to a second round of chemotherapy. Of these patients, 30 percent have a chance of surviving for five years. The hope, Shawver said, is that molecular profiling may suggest alternative treatments, including molecular targeting agents, both for early and late stage patients.
“And as a cancer patient,” Shawver said, “I can tell you that hope is a very, very important thing.”
Shawver’s chemotherapy ended in 2007 and her cancer has not recurred.
The idea of forming a foundation, Shawver said, arose out of a conversation she had with her partner “because she got tired of me complaining about how ovarian cancer patients are treated and that nobody does molecular profiling. She looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you do something about that?’”
After completing her chemotherapy treatment and when she was feeling better, she launched the foundation in late 2007.
She said they named it The Clearity Foundation “because we are trying to get clear on how to treat ovarian cancer.” Asked if she has any ambitions outside of her work that she would like to accomplish, Shawver said: “I was trained as a scientist, but became an entrepreneur. And as some point, I wanted my story to be ‘scientist turned entrepreneur turned philanthropist’.
“And I always thought to be philanthropic I had to be at a certain economic level before I could do that. That’s one of the things that changed after my cancer treatment. I said, ‘You know what, I can help people now. I don’t have to wait. My ambition is to do more philanthropy.”
For more information on The Clearity Foundation, visit www.clearityfoundation.org or to contact Dr. Shawver, you may e-mail her at: lshawver@clearityfoundation.org. The foundation welcomes volunteers and donations.
