Two formative experiences shaped Craig Crews' path into drug development.
First, when he was still a child, his grandmother died from cancer at just 52 years old. "At the time, there weren't very many treatment options," said Crews, who is now the John C. Malone Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and professor of chemistry and of pharmacology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The second was a catastrophic airplane crash at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago in 1979, which occurred after an engine fell off shortly after takeoff and killed more than 200 people. At the time, Crews' father, John H. Crews Jr., was a basic researcher at NASA studying how metals bend until they snap or fracture. As the world's expert in fatigue and fracture of airplane wings, he was called in to help solve the mystery of what went wrong - and how to make aviation safer moving forward.
"I was at a young enough age that it made a big impression," said Crews, who is also the executive director of the Yale Center for Molecular Discovery. "My dad, who I always thought was just a curiosity-driven basic researcher, had real-world impact with his research."
Like his dad, Crews considers himself a curiosity-driven basic researcher, but he's also always looking to translate his academic research into the real world. For years, he's bridged the gap between academia and biotech as a professor and serial entrepreneur with three drug development companies under his belt. Recently, his third Yale startup, Halda Therapeutics, was acquired by Johnson & Johnson - a milestone for a company founded in New Haven in 2018 and built around a novel therapeutic drug for prostate cancer.
