Samuel Murphy

The Operator

A drug company runs on someone who can speak to a scientist and a banker in the same breath.

Samuel Murphy starts the day at 5am, five mornings a week, with a phone pressed to his ear and Shenzhen on the other end. He runs Salubris Biotherapeutics out of Gaithersburg, Maryland - a clinical-stage biotech of roughly forty people - and moonlights as the international business development head for its parent company in China. The nightly calls are not a complaint. They are the price of moving a drug across two regulatory systems at once.

The drug is JK07. It is the first and only clinical-stage selective ErbB4 agonist, and Murphy is betting it can become the first disease-modifying biologic for heart failure.

That is a strange sentence, so it is worth slowing down. ErbB4 is a receptor most cardiologists never think about and most oncologists know too well - it lives in the world of cancer signaling. Murphy's company took that biology and pointed it at the failing heart, a place with millions of patients and, for some forms of the disease, no approved therapy at all. Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction has stubbornly resisted treatment. JK07 is aimed straight at it.

From the bench to the deal table and back

Murphy did not arrive at the corner office by the usual route. He earned a Ph.D. in virology at the University of Pennsylvania, then did a postdoc in gene therapy and translational medicine at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - in the lab of Kathy High, the work that would later spin out as Spark Therapeutics. He had every credential to spend a career at the bench.

Instead he left it. For more than a decade he sold science rather than made it: a director at PriceSpective, a senior principal at IMS Health (now IQVIA) including a stretch running consulting in China, then managing director of IMS Health Capital doing life-sciences investment banking. He learned how money looks at a molecule. Then, in 2017, he co-founded Salubris Biotherapeutics and walked back into the lab he had left - this time as the person deciding which diseases to chase. He took the CEO title in November 2020.

The advice stuck. Ask Murphy what he does and the answer strips away the jargon: "I develop new medicines to treat people and cure people." His children translate it their own way. His daughter says Dad makes medicines. His son, less diplomatically, says his father is a drug dealer. Both are closer to the truth than most elevator pitches.

The bridge between two continents

Salubris Biotherapeutics is the American arm of Shenzhen Salubris Pharmaceuticals, a publicly traded Chinese drugmaker. That makes Murphy a translator in more than one sense - shuttling between a US scientific culture and a Chinese corporate one, between FDA timelines and a parent company's expectations. He describes his management style as flexible: firm when needed, soft when needed. Running a company that never fully sleeps tends to teach that.

He carries the load outside Salubris too, sitting on four company boards and chairing the board of GO Therapeutics. The throughline is the same one his advisor handed him: find the disease, build the thing that fixes it, get it to people.