Laura Benjamin spends her days at the intersection of two stubborn fields. One is polymer chemistry, where chains of repeating molecules can be coaxed into shapes that drug developers rarely see. The other is oncology biologics, where antibodies are exquisite at finding cancer cells but only mediocre at carrying anything useful when they get there. Myris Therapeutics, the Pittsburgh biotech she has led since 2024, is the experiment in what happens when those two fields are forced to share a room.
The premise is the kind of thing that sounds either obvious or impossible depending on who is listening. An antibody-drug conjugate stitches a cytotoxic payload onto a tumor-targeting antibody. The ratio of payload molecules to antibody, in trade jargon, is the DAR. Clinical-stage ADCs typically run a DAR of around eight. Push higher and antibodies tend to misfold, aggregate, or get cleared from circulation before they reach a tumor. Benjamin's team is working on a polymer scaffold - bottlebrushes built with ATRP chemistry - that lets DAR climb to fifty, a hundred, three hundred, without breaking the antibody it rides on. If it works in patients, the math of cancer payload chemistry changes.
Benjamin is not new to oncology executive work, and she is not new to translating a research idea into a clinical-stage company. Before Myris she ran OncXerna Therapeutics for five years, from 2018 to 2023, and raised more than a hundred million dollars to advance two oncology programs through clinical development. OncXerna's distinguishing trick was its biomarker-driven approach to patient selection - figuring out, in advance, which tumors a given therapy was likely to bend. Myris's distinguishing trick is one level upstream of that: figuring out how to give the patient something the field cannot currently deliver.
The path she took into the CEO seat had a brief detour through the boardroom. In June 2023, while still finishing her tenure at OncXerna, she joined the board of directors at BioHybrid Solutions, the Pittsburgh polymer-chemistry company that would later become Myris. A year later she stepped into the operating role. In February 2025 the company unveiled both a new name and a new public identity built around its ultra-high DAR ADC platform. Two months after that, Myris presented at AACR in Chicago - the field's marquee scientific meeting - and the platform stopped being a stealth-mode rumor.
Look at her resume from a distance and the throughline is the steady narrowing of a scientific question. She came out of Barnard College, Columbia, with a B.A. in biology, then took a Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Early academic work put her at Harvard Medical School as an associate professor in pathology, and at Beth Israel Deaconess as a co-director of the Center for Vascular Biology, where she studied how tumors recruit blood vessels. That field - angiogenesis - is the one that taught a generation of cancer researchers how tumor cells hijack the body's own delivery systems. It is also a useful background for a CEO whose company depends on circulating antibodies finding their way through circulation to disease sites.
From academia she crossed into industry at Eli Lilly, where she held senior leadership positions in oncology, including VP and Chief Scientific Officer in that area. That move - lab to large-pharma R&D - is one of the hardest jumps in life sciences, and it is what put her on the short list to be a CEO. She has been one ever since.
It is worth noting where Myris is, geographically. Pittsburgh is not San Francisco. It is not Cambridge. It does not have the dense gravitational pull of a coastal biotech ecosystem. What it does have, in this case, is a polymer chemistry tradition with deep university roots and a small, focused team. Benjamin's job is to convert that local concentration into something that matters globally to oncology. It is a familiar problem for a researcher whose career has been about turning local biology - a specific protein, a specific vessel, a specific patient subset - into a treatment.
What does the immediate future look like? More public scientific outings. A pipeline that Myris describes as preclinical, with the polymer-enabled ADC platform expected to nominate clinical candidates as it matures. Conversations with pharma partners whose oncology pipelines are currently constrained by what a low-DAR conjugate can be asked to do. And almost certainly more capital - building the manufacturing for a high-density polymer ADC is not the work of a seed round.
Benjamin is not a flamboyant operator. Her public commentary is measured, her quotes mostly land on technical opportunity rather than on personality. The interesting drama, by her telling, is in the chemistry. Which is, after twenty-five years of careful translational work, exactly the kind of drama a person of her training would choose to chase.