President
Hearts Consulting Group
Disclosure: I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
Dr. Karen Joy Shaw is President of Hearts Consulting Group, providing consulting services for antibacterial and antifungal drug discovery and development programs. She previously was CSO at Amplyx Pharmaceuticals, leading the preclinical development of fosmanogepix. This novel IV/oral broad spectrum antifungal is currently in Phase 2 clinical development for the treatment of invasive fungal infections. She and her team additionally discovered APX2039, which inhibits the same Gwt1 protein target. APX2039 demonstrates remarkable in vitro and in vivo activity against Cryptococcus and is currently in preclinical development for the treatment of cryptococcal meningitis.
Prior to that, Dr. Shaw was Sr. VP of biology at Trius Therapeutics where she directed the microbiology development efforts for tedizolid (Sivextro), including presentation of the microbiology and pharmacology at the FDA advisory board meeting in March 2014. She was an integral part of the discovery of the novel, broad-spectrum class of inhibitors which target DNA Gyrase/topoisomerase IV (TriBE inhibitors).
Prior to joining Trius, Dr. Shaw was team leader infectious diseases at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, where she developed bacterial microarray technology for E. coli and S. aureus as well as a novel bacterial RNA amplification technology; the combination enabled the first simultaneous microarray analysis of host and pathogen interactions during an in vivo infection. Earlier in her career, as a research fellow at Schering-Plough Research Institute, Dr. Shaw initiated the use of genomic approaches for the discovery of novel antibacterial and antifungal agents, as well leading global epidemiology studies of aminoglycoside resistance.
Dr. Shaw has over 90 publications in the fields of bacterial and fungal genetics and physiology, aminoglycoside resistance, microarray analysis, oxazolidinone resistance and antimicrobial drug discovery. She holds several patents on antibacterial and antifungal targets, assays, small molecules, and the use of bacteriophage cocktails for the treatment of bacterial infection.
