At a family reunion she discovered multiple relatives had cystic fibrosis. Decades later she’s built a $2.6 billion genetic testing company
Katherine Stueland is the CEO of GeneDx.
Good morning! Citigroup in the middle of funding freeze fallout, Ursula von der Leyen offers Trump a “zero-for-zero” tariffs deal, and a CEO’s career path took her into genetic testing.
- Test results. So far in our special series about women in tech, we've covered venture capital and AI. Now we're onto another world: genetic testing. My colleague Andrew Nusca profiles GeneDx CEO Katherine Stueland.
Stueland's journey to the genetic-testing business started as a child, when she discovered at a family reunion that multiple members of her extended family had cystic fibrosis. She wondered what that meant for her and her immediate family. After a few different stops, her career took her back to that world.
On the way there, she worked on the first protease inhibitor for HIV/AIDS, the first cancer immunotherapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and efforts to destigmatize depression and anxiety medications, including Lexapro. Meanwhile, technology advancements started to make genetic testing more accessible. The 2013 Supreme Court case Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics played a role too, preventing companies from patenting isolated human genes.
For breast cancer, Stueland explains, “we’re diagnosing more women with breast cancer earlier, because we’re screening more,” she says, “but the morbidity rate is going down because we’re finding them earlier and able to intervene.”
GeneDx boasts $302 million in annual revenue and a $2.6 billion market cap. “Today I spend most of my time working with rare disease patient advocates,” she says. “It’s kind of full circle in a sense. I did not intend for it to be that way at all.” Read the full story here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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