It all started with an email from Craig Crews asking Tim Shannon if he’d be interested in creating a company. Soon they were meeting for lunch in New Haven to discuss the details and get to know each other better.

“When Craig told me about the idea for using the cell’s degradation capabilities to target specific proteins, I was immediately hooked,” Tim says. “It was one of the cleverest ideas I had heard, and we quickly moved past pleasantries to dive into the exciting possibilities of this approach. Right from the start, I understood how powerful this could be.”

After that, Tim and Craig worked around the clock to get things up and running. Despite encountering challenges along the way, such as skeptics who didn’t believe their approach would work and setbacks in some of their experiments, the team persevered and achieved some exciting breakthroughs, such as shrinking tumors in animals and making the therapy oral.

Tim reflects on the valuable lessons he learned during this time, including the importance of having a plan but being flexible enough to modify it when necessary. Additionally, he emphasized the importance of being a good person and leader, encouraging everyone on the team to recognize their important role in the company’s mission.

Looking back, he believes the early days of Arvinas were a period of experimentation, risk-taking, and hard work, as a small but passionate team came together to make their shared vision a reality.