Francis Burrows is a drug discovery and development scientist with more than thirty years’ experience. He earned a Ph.D. in immunology and completed his training in London and Dallas working on antibody-based therapeutics for cancer. Following a brief foray into gene therapy, he has focused on the biology of disease, primarily cancer, and the discovery, characterization, and development of small molecule drugs. He was a pioneer in the HSP90 field, co-founding Conforma Therapeutics in 2000, and has also worked on inhibitors of various kinases and phosphatases, COX2, and the proteasome. He currently holds the position of Vice President of Translational Research at Kura Oncology, a 2014 startup focused on drugs targeted to the Ras-MAPK pathway and the menin-MLL interaction. His enduring passion is for the application of preclinical and translational science to develop effective targeted drugs for mechanistically-based, biomarker-defined patient populations with high unmet need.