In 2022, just five weeks after becoming the director of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Monica Bertagnolli had a mammogram—and found out she had cancer.
“I went through all my treatment, and I am fine,” said Bertagnolli, the former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), onstage at the TIME100 Summit in New York City on April 23. That's because “every single bit of the treatment I got was supported, funded, and happened because of the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute.”
Bertagnolli was joined onstage at the Summit by two other leaders in the health industry: Dr. Anaeze C. Offodile II, chief strategy officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Tina Deignan, commercial president of Pfizer Oncology, which is a sponsor of the TIME100 Summit. Appearing on a panel moderated by Abby Phillip, anchor of CNN NewsNight, the three experts spoke about innovations in cancer treatment—and the importance of making sure as many people as possible have access to these medical advances.
Deignan, like Bertagnolli, shared a personal story about cancer: One of her colleagues experienced pain in her side and was later diagnosed with Stage III colon cancer. The colleague was in her late 30s—years before doctors typically recommend people get routine colonoscopies.
“I went through all my treatment, and I am fine,” said Bertagnolli, the former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), onstage at the TIME100 Summit in New York City on April 23. That's because “every single bit of the treatment I got was supported, funded, and happened because of the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute.”
Bertagnolli was joined onstage at the Summit by two other leaders in the health industry: Dr. Anaeze C. Offodile II, chief strategy officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Tina Deignan, commercial president of Pfizer Oncology, which is a sponsor of the TIME100 Summit. Appearing on a panel moderated by Abby Phillip, anchor of CNN NewsNight, the three experts spoke about innovations in cancer treatment—and the importance of making sure as many people as possible have access to these medical advances.
Deignan, like Bertagnolli, shared a personal story about cancer: One of her colleagues experienced pain in her side and was later diagnosed with Stage III colon cancer. The colleague was in her late 30s—years before doctors typically recommend people get routine colonoscopies.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hello everyone, good morning. Thank you all so much for being here. It is a pleasure to be joined by this panel of incredible experts.
00:08Dr. Ofadile, I want to start with you. We just watched that video, a powerful video from Olivia Munn about her cancer diagnosis.
00:15And I think we all know intuitively that the trajectory of what happens to a person when they're diagnosed with cancer has changed a lot in the last several decades.
00:27What is it like now to be diagnosed with cancer and how is technology changing the outcomes?
00:36Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
00:38So I'll say right now, for a person who is getting cancer treatment at a place like Sloan Kettering, we're moving to a world of having more personalized diagnosis.
00:49So that means based on your genetic markers, what type of cancer subtype do you have to personalize treatment recommendations?
00:57So what therapeutics, what therapies are best suited for your cancer type to give you the best survival?
01:04So we're moving from a world of generalized medicine to personalized medicine.
01:08It's aspirational, but we're making concrete steps to get there, and that's happening right here, right now in America.
01:14And Tina, Pfizer has set some ambitious goals for bringing new drugs to the market.
01:21What is Pfizer planning in terms of cancer treatment and therapies going forward?
01:28Good morning, everyone.
01:29It is a pleasure to be with you all for this discussion with my esteemed panelists.
01:34So we have set an ambitious goal of delivering eight new breakthroughs in cancer by the end of the decade.
01:42But we are in a race against cancer.
01:45We've made tremendous progress over recent decades, but cancer is racing against us, and we're seeing like an increased incidence of cancer, and particularly at an alarming rate in people in their prime under 50 years old, which is not a time we would have thought about as being at risk of cancer in the past.
02:05And I'll share with you a personal example.
02:08I have a colleague and very dear friend, Lily, who had just given birth to her second child.
02:13She was in her late 30s, had a pain on her side.
02:17Thankfully, it was not written off as a postpartum symptom, and it was further explored, and she was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer.
02:26And that's way before she would have been indicated for a colonoscopy.
02:29And so it's just, she's an example of this emerging face of cancer that's really quite challenging and quite alarming.
02:37So we've made a lot of progress.
02:39We're racing against cancer, seems to be trying to beat us in that race.
02:43So at Pfizer, with that bold goal of delivering eight new breakthroughs by the end of the decade, so we have now committed 40% of our R&D research is solely focused on oncology.
02:54That is over 55 programs, about 30 new molecular entities, so potential new medicines that we're trying to explore as we move through this process.
03:06And we're studying some of the most commonly common cancers across the population, so breast, prostate, DU cancers, hematology, and lung cancer.
03:18And we're dedicating a really focused effort across three scientific modalities, so really trying to take on cancer and make an impact and hopefully deliver those eight breakthroughs.
03:30Yeah, I mean, I think that phenomenon of younger people and these diagnoses is something that I think is causing so much anxiety in the population.
03:38Dr. Bertinoli, can you talk to us about the recent aspect of this?
03:42I think a lot of people are wondering today, where are we headed as a country in terms of how we are funding and supporting the important medical research that we need in order to tackle cancer as a phenomenon?
03:57And talk to us about the beginning of that pipeline and where you see, with all the government cuts that we're about to experience, where you see that research funding coming from.
04:08Dr. Bertinoli, So thrilled to be here, I want to start, though, with something, since we're on the theme of cancer, is I was the former director of the National Cancer Institute before I moved over to be the head of the National Institutes of Health.
04:22Five weeks, five weeks after becoming NCI director, I had a mammogram, and I found out I had cancer.
04:32I am now the director of the National Cancer Institute, I have breast cancer.
04:37I am fine.
04:39I went through all my treatment, and I am fine.
04:43But I will tell you, every single bit of the treatment I got was supported, funded, and happened because of the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute.
04:55And so, it's a really big topic you've given me, let me just riff off of what the two have said and maybe talk about the unique contribution of our taxpayer dollars that go to funding research.
05:13Three areas, because we want to be partners, you represent industry, you represent perhaps the academic world, you know, our big academic institutions like Memorial Sloan Kettering, Breaking Ground.
05:27And what's the contribution of your taxpayer dollars?
05:31We want to leverage what these guys do.
05:33We want to work with them as partners, not duplicate.
05:37And there's three areas that NIH focuses on so as not to duplicate.
05:42The first is fundamental science, the real biology of how our bodies work so that we can understand why that breast cell turned into a cancer and why our bodies didn't just eliminate it like they are supposed to.
06:00When a bad cell pops up, believe it or not, when our bodies are working right, they just get rid of it.
06:06Why did that happen?
06:07That's deep, deep laboratory work.
06:10The second are the clinics.
06:12You know, how do we get these results, do these amazing contributions that come from working in the clinic and getting research out there and doing research directly in the clinics?
06:23But the third, and I think this is even a more important contribution today, is your biology, your disease is a combination of the genes you inherit from your parents.
06:40But it is also profoundly influenced by your environment.
06:44Where you grew up, what kind of food you had, did you get exercise, did you, what's your educational attainment, frankly, did you kind of know how to do the right things?
06:59What's your social support network is like?
07:03You know, if you, we know all these things profoundly influence health.
07:07So this is another part of what your taxpayer dollars do, is expand research into not just the laboratory, not just the clinic, but the communities, and understand how strong and healthy communities can work.
07:24So that's what NIH is focusing on.
07:25Yeah, there's an aspect of that that I'm going to get to later, which is the aspect of health that is about the disparities that we see.
07:34It's based on who people are, where they come from, communities they live in.
07:39But, Tina, if you could just, you know, piggyback off of that, talk to us about the next stage in the development process.
07:47How does Pfizer build on what happens at NIH?
07:53Yeah, no, it's a great question.
07:55And then I do think it's the partnership across sort of the three areas that we represent is critical for us to ultimately be able to deliver those breakthroughs.
08:04I think one of the places I would highlight is in personalized medicine that you referenced and Montague touched upon,
08:12which is ultimately enabled by a fundamental understanding of the biology of the disease.
08:18And I'll give an example of this in lung cancer, which we all know tends to have a fairly challenging prognosis, particularly when diagnosed in the metastatic setting.
08:29But I'm going to share another patient story that I think brings this to life with a patient that I'm happy to say we have a long-term relationship with of Pfizer.
08:39His name is Matt, and about 14 years ago, he was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer at a time when he would have been given a potentially less than a year to live.
08:48But because of the great research that had happened, we had a better fundamental understanding of that disease and know that it's actually a certain segment of lung cancer.
08:58It was called ALP positive, driven by a genetic mutation.
09:01And in that genetic mutation, we had been able to develop a targeted therapy against that because of that understanding.
09:08So I think that sort of illustrates, and of course we worked with institutions like Memorial Sloan Kettering to further explore that in clinical trials.
09:16So 14 years later, and actually I should say when he was diagnosed, Matt was a non-smoker and he was 24 years old.
09:23And so really in the prime of his life.
09:27But 14 years later, happy to say we interacted with him recently.
09:30He has earned his doctorate, he got married, he has a daughter, and has a very positive outlook.
09:36But I think that example illustrates like how sort of the three sectors can work together to really make that real impact on patients' lives.
09:45And Dr. Ophidele, Memorial Sloan Kettering is a great institution.
09:50And I do think it matters where people are treated, what kind of care they get,
09:56whether they have access to personalized medicine.
10:01How are these developments being brought into the marketplace while also taking into consideration
10:08the need to flatten some of these disparities that we see across the spectrum when it comes to different kinds of cancers
10:16and whether people who look like you and me have different outcomes than other segments of the population?
10:23So before I respond, I'd like to react to a comment Monica said, which is right now we are in the midst of really exciting innovations in medicine.
10:32Whether it's AI, single cell sequencing, and on and on and on.
10:36I think the ability for places like MSK collaborating with funders like the NIH and developers like Pfizer to get these innovations to the marketplace is really, really exciting.
10:48So to answer your question, we can actually now think about technologies, the right kind of technologies like AI, to democratize MSK's expertise.
10:57So in a perfect world, in a future world, not too far from now, how can we have physicians in rural America access information, insights that are typically housed in a piece like MSK?
11:10I think the infrastructure exists today, and it's really a policy solution to get this out there.
11:16But I think AI has a huge role to play.
11:19Secondly, at MSK, we thoughtfully created partnerships.
11:22So, for instance, we partnered with Medicis Health System.
11:25It's a safety net hospital in Queens, New York, the largest safety net provider in Queens.
11:30And we're helping them build their cancer centers with our protocols, our pathways, in a mutually beneficial partnership to elevate their standards of care.
11:40So for patients in Queens who have cancer, they don't have to deal with the travel burden, the disruption to their lives to come to Manhattan to get MSK.
11:48With Queens, Medicis Health System, deliver care locally in their environment.
11:53So I'll say it's a blend of technology, democratizing expertise, as well as thoughtful partnerships to get care local, high-quality care local.
12:02I want to pivot for just a moment to talk a little bit about public health, just in general.
12:07Dr. Bertinoli, you've been inside the federal infrastructure around public health, and you talked passionately about the power of taxpayer dollars.
12:19But I also think that there's a trust issue that we're facing as a country.
12:23And the COVID-19 pandemic that we just went through exacerbated that trust problem.
12:30So how do we rebuild?
12:33How do we rebuild a system that has people's trust and maybe learns from some of the mistakes that were made during the pandemic?
12:42So I'm so glad you asked me this.
12:45Well, I can tell you there's one way we're not going to rebuild trust, and that's by public relations campaigns.
12:52Or, here's what you go, you know, you have to, here's what you should do.
12:56Or by experts coming and telling people what they should do.
13:02That's not the way we build trust.
13:03We build trust human being to human being.
13:06And this is why one of the things I am particularly passionate about is our public funding and our public health system getting into every single community.
13:18A couple reasons for that.
13:19Every community is different.
13:21Every person is different.
13:22Every community is different.
13:23It is really critical that we have people who have the bandwidth, the expertise, the connections, the connectivity into those communities to engage with that community.
13:40And you don't earn trust by saying, here's what you should do.
13:42You engage trust by saying, what do you need?
13:46What worries you?
13:47What bothers you?
13:48Because, guess what?
13:50There is absolutely something in our research enterprise that can be offered to a person.
13:58And it's their desire and their investment that we engage them in.
14:03There's a program at NIH that I very much hope blossoms and continues.
14:07It's called Communities Advancing Research Equity for Health, or Care for Health.
14:13And this is exactly what it's doing.
14:14It's going into communities and saying, what's your biggest problem here?
14:20And we will bring research to help you solve that.
14:24I think that's how we are in trust.
14:25Can I ask you, though, that word, if you say the word equity these days in the federal government, I'm not sure that that would get you very far.
14:36Are we walking back an understanding of how communities and their differences impact people's health?
14:46No, absolutely not.
14:48No, absolutely not.
14:49I mean, we, look, we have to, you know, our federal government is here for everyone.
14:59Our federal government is not here for only Republicans or only Democrats or only one race or only another race or, you know, only people who live in New York City.
15:10Our federal government truly is here for everyone.
15:13We have a representational government.
15:16I mean, I won't minimize the fact that there are a lot of challenging discussions going on right now, but the National Institutes of Health, Health and Human Services is here for everybody.
15:31And that's, I'm not afraid of the word equity because that's what equity means.
15:37It means everybody.
15:40It's good to hear.
15:42And Dr. Afideli, if you want to weigh in on that and just share with us how it affects private institutions like Europe.
15:50So a few things.
15:51One is health equity is not zero sum.
15:55It's actually a positive sum.
15:57So elevating the standards of care for all communities in the United States leads to a more productive workforce, overall lower health care spending, and more economic growth.
16:08So that's what we want.
16:11On the MSK side, what I'll say is, as an institution, we're 140 years old, we are really driven by some core values in our mission.
16:20And these missions are immutable across leadership teams, across presidential administration.
16:28Now, as an organization with 20,000 people, we are going to be productive and pragmatic with the government.
16:34But our values inform what we do and how we do it.
16:37This idea of inclusive care for everyone is something we hold dear, and we are really committed to that across the entire organization.
16:45So cancer-related health equity, which persists today, is a problem.
16:51And that's a problem that touches us in direct and indirect ways.
16:54So trying to solve that through partnerships, democratizing our expertise, delivering care in a culturally competent manner, that's what we're committed to doing.
17:04Tina, I want to give you an opportunity to weigh in on that, too, because I think this is such a rich topic.
17:08And it's timely right now.
17:10And I think every phase of the health care process, from the government to the private sector companies like Pfizer to the facilities that treat people, are interacting with this.
17:23And how does Pfizer approach that question?
17:27So, you know, we recognize that all the science innovation in the world and bringing innovative medicines doesn't matter unless we can actually get the medicines into the hands of patients
17:37that need the most.
17:39And we recognize some of the disparities we're talking about, and just a couple of examples that I think will resonate.
17:45We know that black women are more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer much later than their white counterparts.
17:51We know that 20% of Americans live more than 60 miles from an oncologist, making it hard to get equitable care.
17:58So our focus is trying to reach all patients.
18:00And we work, and we also know we can't do that on our own, but we work in partnership across the community, the oncology community, to do so.
18:10And I'll highlight an example we have with the American Cancer Society, where we're in a collaboration with them on their Change the Odds initiative,
18:18which is designed to target underserved communities and try and, like, improve the patient outcomes in those patient populations.
18:28It's emphasized screening, it emphasizes participation in clinical trials, which has historically been a gap, as well as just education to help patients navigate their journey.
18:38So we're looking to reach all patients, and we will collaborate with the community to make sure we're doing so across the board.
18:46And what about cost?
18:48Cost is obviously, maybe it's the biggest factor in access to care.
18:55I think that there has been a conversation nationally in this country about how much it costs to save a life.
19:06How does Pfizer think about that?
19:08And what are you all doing to address that?
19:10Yeah.
19:11So, restating again, we know that the innovation doesn't make the difference unless we can get it into the hands of patients.
19:18And obviously, cost has multiple layers to it.
19:21What we're focused on is working with patients, working with oncology practices to help patients navigate their journey with insurance,
19:31support them with co-pay assistance, and then sometimes in the appropriate circumstances with free medicine.
19:39So we're very focused on how we work with the patient in their circumstance to help them navigate that situation.
19:47Dr. Bertinoli, let me talk for one second, we just have a few minutes left, about preventative care.
19:54Because I think you alluded to that a little bit as you were talking about the environmental factors that go into a person developing cancer.
20:04A lot of it is genetic, some of it is environmental.
20:06People are so interested in what they can do to change their own health outcomes.
20:12I think that that is both powerful and important.
20:16But is the public health apparatus doing enough to educate people about what they can do?
20:25And also to keep up with a desire, you know, I think we just saw this a couple days ago, the synthetic dyes, they're being banned, right?
20:35And I know that the science is a little bit more inconclusive, but the public seemed to really want something to be done about this.
20:46So is the public health community really meeting people where they are to get ahead of some concerns that people have about how they can take control of their own health?
20:56We can do so much more there.
20:59And actually, this is one of the most exciting times, I think.
21:02First of all, there's been a lot, we've spent a lot of our health care dollars attacking disease.
21:12You know, that's where our focus has gone.
21:14Somebody's hurt, they're in trouble, let's do that right now.
21:18We have not, frankly, spent as much time, money, as I think we could, on understanding the fundamentals of prevention.
21:28So you give an example, do we have those data yet?
21:30No.
21:31Can we get those data?
21:33Absolutely.
21:34Especially now with the tools that we have, with the new information technology tools we have, with the data analytics and artificial intelligence methods.
21:44Can we learn from the biggest, broadest possible population to put those puzzle pieces together, to really bring science and data to how guidelines for how people can live a long and healthy life?
22:00I really believe that we can.
22:02And that's what it's going to take, frankly.
22:05Because it's that big of a problem.
22:08The other reason I'm optimistic about this, and you alluded to it, it's going to take engaging everybody in this process.
22:18This is not a solution that we can solve just by the people who walk into Memorial Sloan Kettering's door.
22:24This is a solution that's going to take being a connected, learning health system.
22:32I really, this is one of my big passions, is creating a learning health system so that everybody can contribute to the knowledge that will let us know what we need to do.
22:45And everybody will want to do it because you've all been part of finding the answers.
22:49And Dr. Afidalia, take us out on a positive note, because I do think that the future on science and AI is so bright and exciting.
23:03So what are you the most excited by that AI can do for us in the future?
23:08So I'm really excited by cancer vaccines, actually.
23:13Wow.
23:14So this is vaccines not for prevention, but actually for treatment.
23:18So pancreatic cancer is a very tough cancer.
23:2110% of people live more than five years, abysmal rate.
23:26What we're doing at Sloan Kettering is now using AI to pick out of your pancreatic cancer, what are the unique driver mutations?
23:36What are unique proteins that are associated with your cancer?
23:40And on the back end of that, creating mRNA vaccines targeted to that specific cancer.
23:46So it's an end-of-one therapy.
23:48And we did that, published our results last year.
23:51And what we found is for people who responded, so their body created a protein trigger after the vaccine, they had continued survival three years out.
24:03That's incredibly fascinating.
24:05And think about what that means for taking this from pancreatic cancer to other tough-to-treat cancers.
24:10So mRNA vaccines, incredibly exciting.
24:13That involves AI to pick the mutations.
24:16And that involves a new platform we learned with COVID, mRNA vaccines.
24:19That's incredibly exciting.
24:21Incredibly exciting.
24:22Thank you all so much for the work that you do.