November 2018
Case
HBS Case Collection

David Hysong and SHEPHERD Therapeutics

By: Ananth Raman, John Masko and Aldo Sesia

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:24

Abstract

In 2016, David Hysong, at age 27, found out he had a rare, incurable cancer. Rather than wait around to die, Hysong, a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School, decided to launch a biotechnology company called Shepherd Therapeutics to development treatments for his and other rare cancers. Two years later, the company had several drugs in promising stages of development but were at least 3 to 5 years away from commercialization, if they made it through clinical trials successfully. Only about 4% of drugs that enter clinical trials receive U.S. FDA approval. It is October 2018, and Shepherd is running out of money. Hysong needs to raise $5 million to fund operations for 2019 and at least $20 million for the following few years. But the company is too early to attract the type of venture capital he needs. Even if he got financing, Hysong worried that the company’s mission could be compromised by investors more interested in a return on their investment than saving lives, and he worried about the scaling challenges ahead.