This physician researcher fights disease and people

By day, Jeff Humphrey, MD, is the warm, astute, and incisive Chief Development Officer of Kyowa Kirin pharmaceuticals. But in the early morning hours (and sometimes at night, when he’s not traveling the world), you can find Jeff toe-to-toe with people half his age and twice his size on the mats of Princeton Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, where at 58 he recently earned his black belt. These two things have more in common than you might think.

The first subject of our periodic profiles of interesting physicians, Humphrey has managed to create a near-perfect feedback loop between his art (BJJ) and his career, both of which he covered in this exclusive interview with MDLinx and PhysicianSense. The results—pharmacological breakthroughs created, ace research teams built, and a lifelong love of learning cultivated—speak for themselves. 

Oncology power couple

A self-described math and science geek, Humphrey earned his undergraduate mathematics degree with honors at Harvard, then went back to his home state of Ohio where he attended Case Western Reserve for medical school. There, he promptly married his college sweetheart. You might recognize Rachel Humphrey, his wife, as the rockstar oncologist recently featured in the documentary Breakthrough alongside maverick researcher Jim Allison.

After training in internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Humphrey completed 2 postdoctoral fellowships at the National Institutes of Health—the first in human medical genetics and the second in medical oncology (board eligible in the first, board certified in the second). His NIH bench work mostly focused on molecular and cell biology, as well as biochemistry. There, he published extensively on the Von Hippel-Lindau gene’s role in kidney cancer.

An ‘unpopular decision’

From the NIH, Humphrey’s career took an interesting turn. What could have been a straight shot into academia became a long stint in industry that brought him as far afield as Wall Street and private equity.

“My wife and I both made this very unpopular decision at the time,” Humphrey says. “We realized that both of us in one small academic department was probably not a good idea. So instead we went to industry at different companies and that started a long succession of roughly 4-5 year stints at 5 different companies—always in oncology, always associated with drugs that actually got to market.”

You’ve probably heard of some of those drugs: 

• Ipilimumab, the immune checkpoint inhibitor

• Sorafenib, a treatment for kidney and liver cancer

• Mogamulizumab, a treatment for a type of skin cancer

• Most recently, istradefylline, a treatment for Parkinson's disease