Life can take one in many directions. For Wanda Waugh, 78, her path has been blazed by hard work, something she knew from an early age growing up in the Iola area.
“I grew up a farm kid,” said Waugh. “It was a pretty normal life for me filled with chores and things like that.”
Waugh attended Iola High School where she excelled in class. One of the classes she enjoyed most was chemistry.
“I just fell in love with it,” she said. “I had been using chemistry on the farm but hadn’t really made the connection. So when I started learning about it I just couldn’t get enough.”
Waugh also saw chemistry as a way to get ahead in life.
“When I was growing up, most kids went to high school and that was it,” Waugh said. “I went to a year of junior college in Iola but then left to go to work. In those days you didn’t need a lot of education, you just learned as you went.”
Originally, Waugh went to work for the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) as a chemical analyst. Her work there included analyzing samples to help evaluate anything from soil safety to chemical makeup for oil and gas production throughout the state.
“It was a lot of fun getting to do that kind of work,” Waugh said. “I thought it would be something that could lead to other things and it really did.”
Indeed, after working for the KGS, Waugh moved to Lawrence where she worked as a research assistant at the University of Kansas in the chemistry and pharmaceutical departments in 1971. There, Waugh found a new challenge in a field that was similar and yet not.
“We were doing work on different sets of samples in the medical field where chemicals couldn’t exist in a solution that people could take into their bodies,” Waugh said. “We worked on a lot of different ideas and samples to get something that could be a part of something bigger.”
Most of Waugh’s research was typically only a small portion of what became a bigger puzzle. In most cases, many of the accomplishments her work managed eventually led to other, larger discoveries.
With one exception.
In the case of her work starting in 1994 on a substance which would later be known as Velcade, a drug designed to attack multiple myelnoma and relapsed cell mantle cell lymphoma, the initial discovery was not of just a single part but the entire puzzle at once.
“In all my years of working on that kind of research it was the only one that pretty much went all the way through discovery, testing and made it through using our original formula,” Waugh said. “It was really an accomplishment.”
The payoff, however, was not without a fight. Initially Dr. Shankar Gupta, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) project manager on the drug, had asked Waugh and Val Stella, a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at KU, to work with the substance sample that became Velcade. According to Waugh, after the development process was over, the two research partners were kept out of the loop.
“I didn’t find out about the drug going through the patent process until after I received a phone call from a friend who was calling to congratulate me,” Waugh said. “After that we talked to the university and they filed a lawsuit to get our names on the patent.”
