Theresa Williams

Dr. Theresa M. Williams provides medicinal chemistry consulting services to SHY Therapeutics, LLC. As a founding team member, she has been instrumental in hit identification, target compound design and optimization, and coordinating compound synthesis and QA, biophysical studies, and computational chemistry through CRO partnerships.

Before joining SHY Therapeutics, Dr. Williams spent 25 years at Merck Research Laboratories in West Point, PA, where she contributed significantly to various medicinal chemistry projects. Her notable work includes the development of carbonic anhydrase inhibitors for glaucoma in ophthalmology, research on farnesyltransferase inhibitors in oncology, and the development of first-generation non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) in HIV antivirals.

In her managerial roles, Dr. Williams led projects in neuroscience, focusing on treatments for migraine and schizophrenia, and advanced second-generation NNRTIs to combat emerging clinical resistance. Her team pioneered the first orally bioavailable CGRP receptor antagonist for acute migraine, telcagepant, which, despite being discontinued due to liver toxicity, laid the groundwork for future approved therapies, ubrogepant (Ubrelvy) and atogepant (Qulipta). Her group's research on second-generation NNRTIs culminated in the discovery of doravirine (Pifeltro), approved in August 2018.

Dr. Williams is a co-inventor on 77 patents/patent applications.