How AbbVie researchers toppled widely held scientific beliefs to create new possibilities for patients.

Rebels with a cause

Andrew Petros and Phil Hajduk are rebels, but you might not know it to look at them.

As researchers who spent their careers – 29 years and 19 years, respectively – developing medicines at AbbVie, they were trained to follow the rules and principles of science: ideas that are known to be true, until someone finds a way to prove them wrong.

But while science takes discipline, it also takes the ability to see where rules need to be challenged – or even broken – on the path to pioneering research. If Petros, Hajduk and their colleagues stuck to conventional scientific wisdom, they likely would have failed in their quest to find a way to force cancer cells to die.

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