Christi Shaw serves as Chief Executive Officer of Kite, a Gilead Company. Kite is the only company with global scale dedicated exclusively to the research, commercialization and manufacturing of cell therapy to treat cancer. Christi is driven by values, integrity and a deep connection to people living with cancer and their loved ones after losing both her mother and sister to cancer. Under Christi’s leadership, Kite has received five FDA approvals in CAR T across two cell therapy products for 5 types of blood cancer. In April 2022, Kite became the first company to receive FDA approval for its CAR T-cell therapy in second-line treatment, allowing patients to receive this treatment months earlier in their cancer journey for a potential cure. Within Christi’s first three years at Kite, she has ignited her teams, increasing the number of patients treated nearly 15 times over and Kite’s manufacturing capacity by 50% with the largest, dedicated in-house cell therapy manufacturing network in the world. Her top priority is ensuring every patient who can benefit from CAR T has access, which has resulted in growing patient demand that drove cell therapy product sales to increase 68% in Q2 2022 and a 98% reimbursement rate in the U.S., including Medicare and Medicaid. Kite products are also approved in over 20 countries around the world including through joint ventures and partnerships in China and Japan. Kite recently released five-year patient survival data, a significant milestone showing that CAR T-cell therapy can provide durable responses, suggestive of a potential cure for some patients. Christi currently serves on the board of directors of Avantor and the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) and is on the executive committee and the board of directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO). Before joining Kite, Christi held senior executive positions at Eli Lilly & Co., Novartis Corp. and Johnson & Johnson. Christi holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Iowa State University and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin. She resides with her husband and son in Santa Monica, California. Christi is very active in sustainable farming since her childhood in Iowa and continues the family heritage of soil conservation, forest and wildlife preservation and enablement of generational family farming.