Kevin P. Foley, Ph.D.
Since 2004, Dr. Foley has been Director of In Vivo Pharmacology at Synta Pharmaceuticals, a ˜180 employee Boston-area pharmaceutical company, where his research focuses on the discovery and preclinical development of small molecule drugs for the treatment of cancer, diabetes and autoimmune disorders. Drug development programs that he is currently involved with at Synta include: the oxidative stress inducer elesclomol, which was recently reported to double progression-free survival in a double-blind, randomized and controlled Phase 2b trial for the treatment of metastatic melanoma, and is the focus of a ›$1 billion partnership between Synta and GlaxoSmithKline; STA-9090, a novel HSP90 inhibitor for the treatment of cancer that is currently undergoing multiple Phase 1 clinical trials; and STA-9584, a novel vascular disrupting agent for the treatment of cancer that is currently in preclinical development.
Prior to joining Synta, as a Senior Scientist at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge MA), his group employed mouse genetics for the in vivo validation of genomically derived drug targets and to develop improved models of human disease. Over the course of his career, he has developed more than 175 different transgenic and knockout mouse models. As a Staff Scientist at ZymoGenetics (Seattle WA), he developed a new mouse model of the autoimmune disease, systemic lupus erythematosus. This work implicated the B cell cytokine BLyS (BAFF) as a key player in B cell-mediated autoimmunity, and a BLyS antagonist, Atacicept, is now in multiple Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials for autoimmunity and cancer.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Foley studied the function of the Myc proto-oncogene network with Drs. Robert N. Eisenman and Philippe Soriano at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Seattle WA). He received his Ph.D. in Dr. J. Douglas Engel's laboratory at Northwestern University (Evanston IL) [now at University of Michigan], where he studied the transcriptional regulation of hemoglobin switching during development. Dr. Foley has also served as a NIH grant reviewer and as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for a biotechnology startup company. He has worked in the pharmaceutical industry since 1998.
