The CEO Roundtable on Cancer and its Life Sciences Consortium are inviting nominations for the Dr. Charles A. Sanders Life Sciences Award which will be presented at CEO Roundtable-XIII, the organization’s annual meeting in November, 2014.
“The Charlie” was created by the CEO Roundtable on Cancer and its Life Sciences Consortium to honor Dr. Sanders and celebrate collaborative innovation in cancer drug discovery and development which addresses vital issues that cannot be solved by any single company alone. A renowned scientist, educator, philanthropist, medical doctor and administrator, Sanders, the former chairman and CEO of Glaxo, Inc. (now GlaxoSmithKline) and the chairman of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, represents the tenets of leadership, innovation and collaboration that the Life Sciences Consortium encourages and catalyzes, as charged by its founder, President George H. W. Bush.
The winners of the inaugural Dr. Sanders Awards were Hogan Lovells, Sanofi and SAS, who were recognized for their work on Project Data Sphere, LLC, an independent not-for-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer’s Life Sciences Consortium. Working together, these organizations were foundational in the creation and public launch of www.ProjectDataSphere.org which is providing broad access to cancer research databases and enabling unprecedented research collaboration to solve complex scientific problems.
Dr. Herbert Boyer, founder of Genentech, who co-chaired the inaugural selection committee along with Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said of last year’s winners, “The work of these three organizations exemplify the ethos of Charlie Sanders and his belief that great innovation happens best through great collaboration.”
Nomination submissions for “The Charlie” will be accepted online via the Life Sciences Consortium website: www.ceo-lsc.org/nomination-form. In the spirit of collaboration, nominations from all organizations involved in cancer drug discovery (including academic research institutions and public sector entities) will be considered; nominees need not be Members of the CEO Roundtable or its Life Sciences Consortium.
In addition to Christopher A. Viehbacher, Chair of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer and Chief Executive Officer of Sanofi, the selection committee for the 2015 Dr. Charles A. Sanders Award includes:
· David Brennan, retired CEO, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals
· Dr. Dennis Gillings, Executive Chairman, Quintiles
· Dr. Jim Goodnight, Chief Executive Officer, SAS
· Robert A. Ingram, General Partner, Hatteras Venture Partners
· Dr. Martin J. Murphy, Jr., Chief Executive Officer, CEO Roundtable on Cancer
· William C. Weldon, retired Chairman and CEO, Johnson & Johnson
About Project Data Sphere, LLC
Project Data Sphere, LLC (PDS), an independent, not-for-profit initiative of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer’s Life Sciences Consortium (LSC), operates the Project Data Sphere platform (www.ProjectDataSphere.org) which provides one place where the research community can broadly share, integrate and analyze historical, patient-level cancer phase III comparator-arm data with the goal of advancing future research to improve the lives of cancer patients and their families around the world.