Nancy Kohl

Nancy is an accomplished cancer researcher with over three decades of oncology drug discovery and development experience in big pharma, academic healthcare and biotech. She joined Nuvalent as a Consultant in 2018 and provides guidance primarily in the areas of pharmacology and translational medicine.

Nancy spent over two decades at Merck Research Laboratories, working initially in the area of anti-viral drug discovery and then in oncology. She held positions of increasing responsibility, ultimately playing a key role in establishing the Oncology group at Merck’s Boston laboratory and then leading that group. Her efforts contributed to the approval of two drugs, CRIXIVAN and ZOLINZA, and to the advancement of numerous compounds into clinical trials. Following her tenure at Merck, she spent three years at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she directed the Lurie Family Imaging Center and started a new integrative research center focused on evaluating experimental cancer therapies in relevant in vivo disease models to generate preclinical data to inform efficient clinical trials. Nancy then moved into the biotech sector, where she was Vice President, Biology at Blueprint Medicines. Here she led a team of biologists in discovering and developing targeted kinase medicines for patients with genetically defined diseases, including the FDA-approved compound AYVAKIT. She holds a PhD degree in biochemistry from Columbia University and did postdoctoral work at the MIT Center for Cancer Research.