Initiative Updates: CEO Roundtable on Cancer

Brian Alexander, M.D., M.P.H., succeeds Cindy Perettie as chief executive officer of Foundation Medicine, Inc., a member of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer and a Gold Standard accredited employer.

Previously Dr. Alexander was Foundation Medicine’s chief medical officer since 2019. He brings years of experience as a radiation oncologist at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School.

As of April 6, Cindy Perettie has taken on a new role within Roche Diagnostics.

Dr. Alexander has directed Foundation Medicine’s decision insights strategy to help more oncologists, both in community and academic settings, determine the right treatment, at the right time, for each unique patient. He also served as a White House fellow and Special Assistant to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, where he helped prepare the VA for the transition of administrations, worked to develop a public reporting system for quality, and served as a health policy advisor to the Secretary.

Foundation Medicine is a molecular information company dedicated to a transformation in cancer care in which treatment is informed by a deep understanding of the genomic changes that contribute to each patient's unique cancer. The company offers a full suite of comprehensive genomic profiling assays to identify the molecular alterations in a patient’s cancer and match them with relevant targeted therapies, immunotherapies and clinical trials.

We are grateful to all who participated in the CEO Roundtable on Cancer Vision 2020 Annual Meeting and Conference. It was a vibrant and collaborative forum that helped progress our shared mission of advancing cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

Leaders outline priorities for 2020 and beyond

Although it was the 19^th such event, the Annual Meeting on September 22 was the first virtual meeting due to the pandemic and the first to offer a series of workshops aimed at a range of company leaders who could participate online. CEO Roundtable on Cancer Chairman Bob Bradway, also CEO of Amgen, led the session with a challenge and call to action.

“Amid all the uncertainty and disruption caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, some things have remained the same and one of them, sadly, is that cancer never takes a day off. We can’t let the distraction of the pandemic take our eyes off the unacceptable toll in terms of death, pain and suffering that’s caused by cancer.”

- Bob Bradway, Chairman, CEO Roundtable on Cancer

Dr. Andy Crighton, CEO of the Roundtable on Cancer, said the work of the Roundtable has not slowed down.  He said five new members were added to the organization: Menarini Group, BeiGene, Daiichi Sankyo, Foundation Medicine and Alphanumeric Systems. We are reaching out to new sectors including financial and technology to build on a base of life science members. The expertise of these sectors is needed as we expand Gold Standard accreditation and seek to accelerate cancer research.

Crighton noted that the Gold Standard remains an accreditation and not an award. “An accreditation is earned and must be maintained. Therefore, you can be assured that a Gold Standard company still has the practices and policies in place even with a change in leadership,” Crighton said.

He announced the Gold Standard is being expanded to include well-being.

"The definition of well-being is how people think, feel and function on a personal and social level and how they evaluate life. Organizations can have a positive or negative impact on an individual’s well-being. Individuals with a strong sense of well-being are better able to withstand critical issues such as a cancer diagnosis so it is important that we build this into our Gold Standard to help companies move forward."

- Dr. K. Andrew Crighton, Chief Executive Officer, CEO Roundtable on Cancer

MaryLisabeth Rich, CEO Roundtable on Cancer President, congratulated Bristol Myers Squibb for its Global Gold Standard achievement and welcomed newly Gold Standard accredited organizations Anne Arundel Medical Center,  High Point University, Huntsman Cancer Institute, and Memorial Hermann Health System.

She said the Gold Standard update includes an important focus on health equity, which will be incorporated in each pillar. This focus has inspired a new initiative to launch in early 2021 that looks to partner Gold Standard companies with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to accelerate our mission and extend accreditation benefits to communities experiencing cancer disparities.  Since the meeting, the scope of the project has expanded to include Hispanic-serving institutions.

“We want to make the Gold Standard Pillars active and living in the HBCU setting so they are not just applicable to HBCU employees but to students and communities. The cancer belt in the US overlaps with the strongest geographic concentration of HBCUs. CEOs are equipped to do this because of the Gold Standard framework, because corporations have high impact and care about the communities where they live and work and because health is a priority for each and every one of our members."

- MaryLisbeth Rich, President, CEO Roundtable on Cancer

Crighton said another CEO Roundtable initiative, Project Data Sphere, is making great strides in delivering research results and data access. He said that in 2021 we “need to broaden the view of how we look at data and be able to incorporate new data with restricted access for a short period of time but then continue to look to put it into the open platform.”

Bill Louv, President of Project Data Sphere, agreed that his team is making steady progress getting more data on the platform. He said usage of that information is increasing and a reflection of productivity, the number of peer-reviewed journal articles based on platform data, is up to 87.

“That is dramatic evidence demonstrating that open sharing is a very effective model,” Louv said. But he warned that, “there are some headwinds here with increased concern about privacy, about IP, about cost of deidentifying data sets. We see some of our data providers becoming more reticent about sharing patient level data.”

He said PDS will take a leadership position in advocating for more sharing and reuse of clinical trial data.

“We provide patient level data in an open science platform. That is unique. The other platforms have accomplished great transparency and discoverability by bringing together meta data for most of the clinical trials that are sponsored in this country. There’s quite a path from discoverability via meta data to actually acquiring or getting permission to use the patient level data.”

- Dr. William Louv, President, Project Data Sphere

Louv also gave an update on the five PDS research programs that leverage data from the platform.

The meeting was followed by a series of shorter sessions focused on well-being, health disparities, data sharing and AI applied to measuring tumor progression. In a general session, Roundtable Founding CEO Bob Ingram shared about the work he is doing as a member of the President’s Cancer Panel.

The CEO Roundtable on Cancer started 2020 with a new leadership team and a new vision to take the Roundtable and its programs to the next level.

K. Andrew Crighton, M.D. has joined as Chief Executive Officer of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer and Project Data Sphere^®.  He succeeds founding CEO, Martin J. Murphy, DMedSc, PhD, who will remain with the organization as a member of the board of directors and chief executive of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer-China.

MaryLisabeth Rich arrived in mid-January as CEORT - President Gold Standard and Member Engagement.

Betty Whichard moved to the role of Chief Financial Officer, a position that Ken Lee held for many years pro-bono. We will continue to rely on Ken as a strategic advisor in the future. 

The team is talking with Roundtable members, supporters and potential members to learn more about the latest challenges employers face in building a healthy workforce.

“One of the gaps we’ve placed as a high priority is health disparities,” Andy said. “CEOs through their personal visibility and their corporate profile have the opportunity to improve the health and well-being for their community as well as employees but we need to pivot from the approach we have taken in the past.” 

Andy has 20 years of experience engaging business leaders to develop measures that identify the impact of the work environment on well-being at individual and organizational levels. He recently retired as chief medical officer at Prudential Financial, where he oversaw the health and well-being, safety and medical business consulting worldwide and led a strategic transformation of the business towards a more holistic view of health, including physical, emotional, social, spiritual, financial and cognitive well-being.

MaryLisabeth previously was Senior Vice President Development for the American Cancer Society Global Headquarters in Atlanta.  During almost 15 years with the ACS and its foundation over two stints, she has been a catalyst for building relationships, forging partnerships, executive engagement, mustering resources and advancing investments across the organization’s portfolio.

She also spent nine years in Higher Education Philanthropy, playing an integral part in three capital campaigns totaling $600 million, and was the executive director for Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). While at SRC, she developed and implemented communication and marketing in support of a $100 million annual research allocation operation among other accomplishments. 

Betty joined the Roundtable and PDS in August 2018. Before that, she served as Vice President of Finance and Administration for The Medical Foundation of North Carolina, where she managed assets totaling approximately $315 million. She previously was Financial Manager of Foundations & the Alumni Association at East Carolina University. She also spent nine years as Chief Financial Officer, ERM and Operations Manager for 102 store locations for Trade Oil Co.

After Trade Oil Co. merged with WilcoHess in 2005, Betty served as the Director of Finance and Enterprise Risk Management. She also served as the General Financial and Administrative Manager for the Greenville, NC, divisional office. Betty has spent more than 17 years in public accounting serving a diverse clientele.

BeiGene and John V. Oyler, Chairman, Co-Founder and CEO. BeiGene started in Beijing and has expanded to be a global company. Its focus is discovery, development, and commercialization of innovative, molecularly-targeted, and immuno-oncology drugs for the treatment of cancer.

Daiichi Sankyo Inc. and Ken Keller, President and CEO. Daiichi Sankyo is a global pharmaceutical company with corporate origins in Japan. It provides innovative products and services in more than 20 countries around the world. With more than 100 years of scientific expertise, the company draws upon a rich legacy of innovation and a robust pipeline of promising new medicines to help patients.

Foundation Medicine Inc. and Brian Alexander, Chief Medical Officer. Foundation Medicine is a molecular information company dedicated to a transformation in cancer care in which treatment is informed by a deep understanding of the genomic changes that contribute to each patient's unique cancer. The company offers a full suite of comprehensive genomic profiling assays to identify the molecular alterations in a patient’s cancer and match them with relevant targeted therapies, immunotherapies and clinical trials. Foundation Medicine’s molecular information platform aims to improve day-to-day care for patients by serving the needs of clinicians, academic researchers and drug developers to help advance the science of molecular medicine in cancer.

The Menarini Group and CEO Elcin Barker Ergun. Menarini Group, the leading Italian pharmaceutical company in the world, has 17,640 employees in 136 countries, including the US in San Diego and Philadelphia.