Wendy B. Young is an advisor at Google Ventures and a former senior vice president of small molecule drug discovery at Genentech.
Wendy B. Young, Ph.D. | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | USA |
| Alma mater | Wake Forest University (B.S., M.S.) Princeton University (Ph.D.) |
| Scientific career | |
| Doctoral advisor | Edward C. Taylor |
Young received her B.S. and M.S. from Wake Forest University, working with Prof. Huw Davies. [1] She was co-author on an early application of Davies' rhodium(II) carbenoid insertion - Cope rearrangement chemistry, leading to the total synthesis of three small tropane natural products. [2] Young received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1993, working with Edward C. Taylor on heterocycles [3] derived from natural pigments, one of which ultimately became pemetrexed [4] (Alimta), [5] an oncology treatment. In her postdoctoral fellowship with Samuel Danishefsky, Young was among one of a handful of groups in the mid-1990s to synthesize paclitaxel (Taxol), [6] a highly-oxygenated terpenoid natural product used to treat cancer.
Despite multiple employment offers on the East Coast of the United States, [1] Young chose to remain in the San Francisco Bay Area for her professional career. From 1995 to 2006, Young worked at Celera Genomics, studying inhibitor compounds of human plasma proteins [7] such as kallikrein and Factors VIIa and IXa. She was recruited to Genentech in 2006, and in 2018 was promoted to Senior Vice President of Small Molecule drug discovery. [1] One of her major research successes was development of a chemistry campaign against Bruton's tyrosine kinase, leading to molecules to potentially treat rheumatoid arthritis and B-cell lymphomas. [8] Her team developed fenebrutinib, currently in Phase II clinical trials for several autoimmune disorders. [9] In 2023, she became an advisor at Google Ventures.