Mike Varney

Mike Varney, PhD is the former Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech (NYSE:DNA) Research and Early Development and a member of the Roche Corporate Executive Committee. In this role, he was responsible for all aspects of Genentech R&D’s early innovation, drug discovery, and development of drug candidates for the US based R&D organization in Roche. Early in his career, Mike was one of the original fifteen employees at Agouron, a biotech company based in San Diego that developed protein structure-based drug design as a new drug discovery approach. While there, he and his team pioneered the process of rational drug design. From these efforts came Viracept, an HIV protease inhibitor that achieved the highest first year launch sales (>$350M) of any biotech product at the time. When Pfizer acquired Agouron in 2000, Mike became leader of drug discovery for Pfizer’s La Jolla organization.

In 2005, Mike was recruited to Genentech to take the company beyond biologics and create a small molecule drug discovery capability. Within 10 years, the small molecule organization had produced more than 40% of Genentech’s development portfolio including the marketed anticancer agents Erivedge and Cotellic.

Mike has a BS in Chemistry from UCLA, a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from CalTech and was an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow at Columbia.