Initiative Updates

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.

More than 2,400 researchers are using the Project Data Sphere® platform to answer important questions about cancer. Many of them have offered feedback on how we can make the platform even easier to use.  We are delighted to announce that we expect an updated platform to be available early in 2Q 2020.

A new PDS website will be launched at the same time, offering more information on our programs, introductions to new program managers and easier ways to communicate with us.

The website will be a place that you can register for important events like the PDS Symposium IX on rare cancer registries that we are planning for Oct. 7, 2020, in the Washington DC area. 

This annual symposia series has consistently elevated the conversation about research areas that are ripe for fresh attention in the realm of cancer clinical trials, often deriving major new thrusts from academia, industry as well as from our FDA.

Rare cancer registries hold potential to solve some of the most difficult challenges to advancing treatment of these rare cancers, which account for more than 25% of the cancers reported worldwide.

The symposium attempts to bring together multiple stakeholders representing all sides of this challenge: Practice in the clinic, Pharmaceutical research, Policy and regulatory science, and Patient advocacy to brainstorm the operational dynamics between the groups.

Registries can impact these four areas in the following ways:

• Refine clinical decision making and more effectively manage patient therapy.
• Assist pharma in designing comparator arms efficiently, thus accelerating the drug development process.
• Inform regulators who must decide whether to approve new medicines and how to use them in rare cancers.
• Provide relief for the suffering patients with better treatment strategies.

Symposium IX will consider how registries for rare tumors might address these existing shortcomings and drive improvements in patient care. More information will be coming soon.

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.

The CEO Roundtable on Cancer has accredited Anne Arundel Medical Center with the CEO Cancer Gold Standard^TM recognizing its efforts to reduce the risk of cancer for its employees and covered family members.

“Anne Arundel Medical Center is honored to be among the leading organizations to achieve the CEO Cancer Gold Standard Accreditation,” said Sherry B. Perkins, president of Anne Arundel Medical Center. “We strive to provide the highest quality of care for our patients and are equally committed to promoting the wellbeing of our employees and their families. We offer the latest technology in diagnostics and treatments with access to innovative research and clinical trials to deliver care and support that comes with compassion. Cancer is not only treating a disease; it’s caring for each person throughout his or her journey.”

Employers from many industries are keenly aware of the positive impact they can have on health and controlling healthcare costs when they take steps to address cancer and other chronic diseases.

More than 90 experts in the oncology community were convened on April 17, 2019, in Bethesda, Md., to focus on immune-related adverse events (irAEs) that can occur with the use of combination checkpoint blockade therapies. Co-sponsored by Project Data Sphere, LLC (PDS) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), this symposium focused on ways to strengthen irAE and toxicity reporting and data collection so as to better understand which patients are more likely to suffer these often-devastating adverse events. As attendees learned from a patient advocate who spoke, it is not unheard of for a patient who succumbs to an irAE to be tumor-free at the time of death. 

Thought leaders organized presentations and panels on the clinical presentation of irAEs and toxicity during combination therapy, preliminary findings from immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) clinical trial data submitted to the FDA and post-marketing surveillance data, and current initiatives to accelerate knowledge with biorepositories and patient registries. The Symposium was distinguished by the FDA presentations of selected clinical trial data on ICIs and the post-market surveillance (FAERS) data on adverse events associated with ICIs; neither of these rich FDA data sources had ever been presented.

More than 60 oncologists, data scientists, pharma/biotech industry leaders, patient advocates, health science research investigators, and regulators representing myriad esteemed institutions convened in Bethesda, Md., on August 8 for Project Data Sphere, LLC’s (PDS) sixth symposium co-sponsored with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). With the goal of accelerating new options for small cell lung cancer patients (SCLC) in a stagnant treatment landscape, PDS is collaborating with the FDA on the development of an external control arm for SCLC clinical trials. This would enable patients to be enrolled directly into a trial’s new drug investigational arm, which ultimately would reduce the number of patients per trial as well as the cost and time of discovery for new treatment options. The daylong event featured a combination of individual and panel presentations and lively discussions