“This is, of course, unlike anything any of us have experienced before. This synchronous global shutdown caused by what is a pretty tricky virus—a virus that had a head start on all of us. But we're gaining ground fast.”

Under Robert Bradway’s leadership, Amgen is aggressively pursuing SARS-CoV-2 on a number of fronts. Some of their efforts build on past successes, focusing on antibodies and the immune system. Another looks to the small island nation of Iceland for genetic clues about the virus’s mutations and spread.

Bradway holds true to the credo to first do no harm as he thinks about the many other patients who rely on Amgen’s life-saving medicines: “We need to make sure that while we're responding to COVID-19, we're not doing it at the expense of all these other patients, or we're going to create a secondary healthcare crisis that we never intended and that we could have prevented by striking that balance.”