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n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m | S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 1 9 | n e w h a v e n B I Z 21 to help him start the company," Shannon recounts. "We had lunch, and within 15 seconds I was really interested. I agreed to come on as CEO and bring Canaan in as lead investor." "One of Craig's strengths is that he's a world-class scientist, but he's also very good at connecting dots that might not be obvious to others — but are obvious to him. So I got very quickly sold on trying to see if I could help him do that." Shannon describes the "symbiotic relationship" needed to enable an investor/executive to build a com- pany based on a profound discovery by a scientist who cannot function as an executive (because, in Crews' case, he's employed by Yale). "Craig is brilliant at conceiving of how to do something new and innovative that could be really important," Shannon says. "And the concept here was mind-boggling. What he needed help in doing was building the business around that to support the [science] to ultimately produce the drugs that are now being tested." And to build that business, Crews adhered to one fundamental prin- ciple: "You hire great people," he says. "We had Tim. We hired a head of chemistry named Andrew Crew [from Astellas Pharma, who joined Arvinas at the beginning of 2018 as senior vice president and chief technology officer], who brought with him a great team that helped us hit the ground running." at team today is headed by president and CEO John G. Hous- ton, who spent nearly two decades at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) as senior vice president of specialty dis- covery and was a member of BMS' R&D executive leadership team. "So, if you want great results," Crews says, "you hire great people." Arvinas' leading drug candidate, ARV-110, a targeted therapy for prostate cancer, entered Phase 1 trials this summer. e trials take place in four sites, one of which is Yale, Crews says. It includes approximately three dozen males with metastatic prostate can- cer and lasts into the spring of 2020. ARV-110's PROTAC degrades the androgen receptor, a protein already targeted by a handful of FDA-ap- proved drugs. Crews and his team calculate that, by degrading rather than inhibiting this receptor, its PROTAC will be able to treat patients who derive no benefit from or have become resis- tant to existing drug therapies. Arvinas' second drug, ARV-471, has now has the green light from the FDA for clinical trials to begin, so the company has begun actively recruiting subjects for research INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP Continued on page 45

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