In a move that underscores Duarte, Calif.-based City of Hope’s mission to translate scientific discovery into real-world outcomes, the organization recently appointed Vanessa Almendro Navarro, PhD, as chief commercialization officer.
In her role, Dr. Almendro Navarro is at the helm of establishing City of Hope’s strategic direction for the commercialization of its intellectual property, data and research results. She previously served as vice president, and head of science and technology innovation at Danaher.
Dr. Almendro Navarro spoke to Becker’s about her new role and how City of Hope plans to make faster, more disciplined decisions about which discoveries to advance.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How does your role compliment City of Hope’s operating model? Will it alter how fast the organization can say yes or no to advancing innovation?
Dr. Vanessa Almendro Navarro: What we aim to do at City of Hope is to reimagine the engine that we have to accelerate innovation toward commercialization and patient impact.
At City of Hope, our main goal is to deliver outstanding and compassionate care to our patients.
For us to be able to do that, it is important that we look at innovation not as a series of handoffs — from lab, to clinic, to trials, to commercialization — but as a single, integrated operating system. Traditionally, in many academic medical settings and hospitals, you often see that the connectivity between discovery, development and commercialization is not there. Those steps are usually isolated.
We are trying to collapse those three steps. All the main leaders within City of Hope — including our scientists, clinicians, clinical trial teams and our commercialization engine — are working to create a shared framework and a road map that can help us find the fastest path for the scalability of our science. Moving forward, we will evaluate discoveries through three lenses simultaneously: patient impact, clinical and operational scalability, and commercial and partnership readiness.
We absolutely believe this shared framework is going to help us say “yes” faster to discoveries that we believe we can accelerate and scale to enable access for patients. It is also going to help us say “no” to those that we believe might not serve patients in the way we want to serve them.
And while we recognize the challenges ahead of us — we are from an organizational standpoint ready — we are primed for transformation. We are embracing this new future where we are truly committed to accelerating innovation, because that is what our patients need. We hope that this new view, this new integrated operating model and this new strategy are going to help us get there.
Q: How will you help City of Hope’s leadership team decide which discoveries are truly strategic for the system to scale?
VAN: An important question for us is how to build the right balance in our portfolio of innovation between basic research and our translational research.
We want to have a framework to still give space to our investigators to do the basic science that they need to do, but that can help us strengthen the translational portfolio and build a much more rigorous process that can help us advance this portfolio in a timely and cost-efficient manner. We are building this framework right now.
There are going to be three key components that we will be addressing for every single discovery that we want to advance toward commercialization and patient impact.
The first is thinking about the patient impact. Having physician-scientists who are treating patients on a daily basis makes it very easy for us to ensure that the interventions, the science or the discoveries we are developing have a very clear path to changing the treatment paradigm for a specific patient. We want to ensure that we can really understand what that patient impact is.
The second is identifying what the clinical and operational scalability is of our technology. We need to ensure that we can run clinical trials to test these technologies and that we can scale the technology. Scalability is extremely important for access.
The third component is the commercial and partnership readiness of our technologies. It is important that as we are developing these assets and identifying or advancing them through clinical validation to understand the potential of these new interventions. We also will start thinking about how we are going to enable access to these technologies through commercialization.
Q: How are you thinking about the operational and financial trade-offs of running national trials while still delivering consistent, high-quality cancer care locally? Do you have any advice for how other hospitals and health systems can do the same?
VAN: In today’s environment, building such operational efficiency is going to be a must for many healthcare systems. It is no longer optional. One opportunity to build such efficiencies is embracing technologies.
To give you an example, at City of Hope we are very focused on improving our clinical trial network by adopting AI, as well as adopting other technologies to help us evolve our operating model to be much more digitally efficient.
That digital efficiency, by the way, is not only important for day-to-day operations, but it can
relieve overall administrative burden to organizations. Why is this technological modernization important for us? Clinical trials are not an add-on, clinical trials are an integral part of our care strategy.
As science continues to make progress, and the toolkit of therapeutic interventions continues to expand, it is going to be critically important that we incorporate our clinical trial engine as part of our care model to ensure our patients can access the latest innovations in cancer care.
Q: What metrics or data will you use to demonstrate that tighter integration between discovery, trials and commercialization is actually improving time to patient access, clinical adoption or system sustainability?
VAN: There are three components that are going to be important for us where we will be
building the right metrics. The first is speed. We will measure the time it takes from discovery to first-in-human clinical trials and ultimately to commercialization.
The second component is clinical de-risking. In today’s environment, successful commercialization depends on advancing technologies that demonstrate meaningful clinical signals early in development. This includes thinking about early indicators of clinical efficacy and safety.
The third component focuses on access and commercialization outcomes. We want to make sure that not only are we able to de-risk technologies and find the right commercialization path, but that those technologies can then get approved and reach the cancer community.
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