Kathy’s Story
“I will never forget the doctor looking at me and saying, ‘I’m sorry, you have cancer.’ And not just any cancer, one of the lousy ones with a weird name and no effective treatments. Three years to live. Incurable. No grey.”
When Kathy Giusti was given her fatal diagnosis in 1996, she was 37, with a rising career, one-year-old baby, and plans to have a second child. In a single “WTF” moment, her life would take a seismic shift, going from senior executive at a pharmaceutical company that developed and marketed life-saving drugs, to an impatient patient, facing a disease where no effective drugs existed. “Dear Nicole,” she wrote to her one-year-old daughter in a journal with a sunflower on its cover after being diagnosed. “I’ve been officially diagnosed with multiple myeloma. I am so sorry because I know it’s going to be a tough road for all of us…”
Writing that journal entry would turn out to be Kathy’s first step in going from a WTF moment to a WTD (what to do) action plan. Would she dare to have another child, to give Nicole a sibling, a friend, a soulmate in life? How could she build memories for her family that would live on after she was gone? How did she want to spend the precious time that remained?
At the time Kathy was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, there were no treatments in the pipeline, so Kathy knew she would have to create her own hope. That meant not only conducting research where there was none but doing it with unprecedented speed and precision. Her first call was to the person she had always turned to in times of crisis: her twin sister, Karen. Together, they founded the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF). Faced with three years to live, the two sisters started with a single want: not letting one of them die.
Kathy would achieve that want and so much more. The foundation she created would help develop drugs that would keep her cancer at bay, buying her invaluable time. She would go on to have a second child, her beautiful son David. And when the cancer finally worsened, Nicole and David would be by her side when she got a cancer-stopping stem-cell transplant, the cells a life-saving gift from her twin sister Karen. The transplant, combined with a cocktail of new drugs developed with the support of the MMRF would ultimately drive Kathy’s cancer into full remission. But for Kathy, remission was not enough.
Since curing her multiple myeloma, Kathy has guided thousands of patients through their treatment journeys. Her work at the MMRF led to 15 new FDA-approved drugs and increased life expectancy for patients from three years to ten years. She co-founded the Harvard Business School (HBS) Kraft Accelerator, where she created a playbook for organizations across all disease states to accelerate cures. And she worked under three presidents to fight cancer, appointed by President Bush to the National Cancer Advisory Board (NCAB), by President Obama to the Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group, and served as an advisor to the Biden Moonshot program. For her work, Kathy was ranked #19 on Fortune’s list of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. What began as a three-year death sentence turned into a 30-year crusade to transform care for millions.
But while Kathy wasn’t done with fighting cancer after remission, cancer wasn’t done with her either. In 2022, she received a new diagnosis, this time breast cancer. Her second battle was not against a death sentence, but it was equally humbling for its own reasons. She had to learn hard lessons over again and face a still deeply broken healthcare system.
Today, as a two-time cancer survivor, business leader and healthcare disrupter, Kathy’s crusade continues. That’s why she has written her book FATAL TO FEARLESS, to give EVERY patient a fighting chance. FATAL TO FEARLESS is a patient’s best friend on the journey, helping them to fear less and live more.
As someone who has changed the healthcare system from inside and out, Kathy understands firsthand that the promise of today’s science to change lives is truly amazing. But the hard truth is that the system remains badly broken. And fighting your way through it can be its own kind of death sentence. As Kathy says, “The greatest fear that lives in the hearts of patients is to know that a new drug out there is working… that a new field could be curative… but they may not live long enough to get it.” Kathy is living proof that if you take the right steps, you can buy yourself time. And with today’s science, a year can buy you a lifetime. Kathy’s mission is to share what she’s learned, so all patients can take the steps they need to optimize their own care.
