Sharon
Cunningham.

The Company She Is Actually Running

Shorla Oncology does not discover new molecules. It reformulates old ones. This sounds boring until you consider the specifics. A child with acute lymphoblastic leukemia who cannot swallow a tablet. A woman on breast-cancer therapy whose regimen requires an infusion line she does not have. An oncologist prescribing methotrexate in an inpatient dose that has to be measured in a syringe because there is no oral solution on the American market. Sharon Cunningham runs a company that makes the oral solution.

The pitch, roughly: take proven oncology drugs whose original formulations no longer fit modern clinical practice, and rebuild them - as liquids, as pediatric doses, as ready-to-use vials - until the FDA agrees they solve an unmet need. As of the most recent public disclosures, Shorla has four such approvals on the US market, including JYLAMVO (an oral methotrexate solution launched with EVERSANA in December 2023, then expanded to pediatric indications in October 2024) and IMKELDI (approved for certain leukemia indications). The company has raised roughly $43.3 million in total funding, with a Series B closed around September 2025.

Cunningham co-founded Shorla in January 2018 with Orlaith Ryan, a former colleague from EirGen Pharma in Waterford. Ryan is a pharmaceutical scientist. Cunningham is a chartered accountant. This is a slightly unusual founder pairing for an oncology company, and one of the things that makes it work.

Portfolio, roughly to scale

Illustrative widths. All four are FDA-approved specialty oncology products; three cluster around women's, orphan and pediatric indications.

Clonmel to Cambridge

Shorla is headquartered in the Questum Acceleration Centre at Ballingarrane Science & Technology Park in Clonmel, County Tipperary. Clonmel has roughly 17,000 people. It is not, in any traditional reading of the industry, a natural home for an FDA-approved specialty pharma company. It has one now.

The geography question was answered in 2021. Cunningham moved from Waterford to Boston with her husband Stephen and their three sons - Rónan, Oisín and Tadhg. The children were, at the time, small. Boston is where the FDA-facing work happens. Massachusetts is where the biotech investors live. If your primary market is the United States and your regulator is in Silver Spring, at some point the CEO gets on the plane and stays.

The MassBio board seat, which Cunningham holds, is a consequence of that decision. So is being named an AACSB Influential Leader in 2023 by the accreditor of business schools - Cunningham's MBA is from University College Dublin's Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, class of 2015.

The Path In

Before Shorla there was EirGen Pharma, in Waterford, where Cunningham led finance for seven years. EirGen was acquired by OPKO Health, a NASDAQ and NYSE-listed group, and Cunningham became a Compliance Officer and served on OPKO's SOX disclosure committee. This is the kind of experience that shows up later as unglamorous competence: knowing what a 10-K looks like from the inside, knowing how the finance function of a listed pharmaceutical company actually runs.

Her academic route was Cork for finance (BSc, University College Cork), PwC for the ACA training, then UCD Smurfit for the MBA in 2015. Later: a Certificate in Healthcare Innovation from MIT and Harvard Medical School, and a Certificate in Healthcare Leadership from Columbia. If you sort by credentials, the profile is closer to a public-company CFO than an oncology founder. That is the point.

Career timeline

• Pre-2018Head of finance at EirGen Pharma, Waterford. Compliance role at OPKO Health.
• January 2018Co-founded Shorla Oncology in Clonmel with Orlaith Ryan.
• 2019Ireland's Best Young Entrepreneur.
• 2020Irish Times "50 people to watch." Shorla wins Local Enterprise of the Year at the KPMG / Irish Times Business Awards.
• 2021Relocates the family from Waterford to Boston. US commercial buildout begins.
• 2023US commercial launch of JYLAMVO with EVERSANA. AACSB Influential Leader.
• 2024Joint EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Ireland with Orlaith Ryan. Pediatric expansion of JYLAMVO.
• 2025Represents Ireland at EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year. Series B close.

Why the Boring Drugs

Big pharma discovers. Shorla reformulates. The reason there is a business here is the same reason there is a business in generics but slightly weirder: some proven oncology drugs are hard to give to actual patients. Kids cannot always swallow adult tablets. Some infusions need reconstitution in ways that go wrong in busy oncology day units. Some drugs come off patent decades ago and nobody has ever bothered to make the pediatric label, because pediatric oncology markets are small and the FDA work is expensive.

Shorla's answer is to do that expensive FDA work anyway, on a small enough capital base that the economics of a small population still make sense. This requires a founder who can look at a P&L for a $10 million-a-year drug and see a real business, and another founder who can tell you, in detail, how to keep methotrexate stable in a liquid formulation for the label period. Cunningham and Ryan, respectively.

Small Facts, Filed Under Sharon

• She named the company Shorla - an Irish-inflected coinage picked with Ryan for warmth, not for search engine optimization.
• Her undergraduate degree is in finance. She got the healthcare training later, at MIT/Harvard and Columbia, once she needed it.
• She is on the board of MassBio, the Massachusetts biotech trade association, and a member of the Forbes Business Council.
• The 2024 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Ireland trophy went jointly to Cunningham and Orlaith Ryan - both names on the same award, which is not the usual format.
• She is from Stradbally, County Waterford, which is a small coastal village on the south Irish coast. Population comfortably under a thousand.