Extra Time

On International Women's Day, Adam talks with Dr Annalisa Jenkins, one of the industry’s most accomplished leaders.

Annalisa’s inspirational career spans over 25 years in the global biopharma industry – she started her career at St Barts, in London, where she trained as a cardiologist, before joining the British Royal Navy as a medical officer during the Gulf Conflict, achieving the rank of surgeon lieutenant commander during her time there.

Annalisa spent almost two decades producing a pipeline of innovation at Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck Serono – she has built and led scientific, regulatory and medical affairs teams to advance programs from scientific research through clinical development, regulatory approval, and into healthcare systems globally.

More recently, Annalisa, has focussed her experience on building and financing biotech companies, pursuing cures for the most challenging rare diseases and working to address important medical issues globally. She served as President and CEO of Dimension Therapeutics, a leading gene therapy company that she took public on the NASDAQ and subsequently sold to Ultragenyx in 2017.

Annalisa is a committee member of the Science Board to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, board member at Faster Cures, a centre of The Milken Institute and Chair of The Court at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

She also sits on the board of many growing companies and is a fierce champion for diversity and inclusion, particularly for women in science.

Adam talks to Dr Parag Mallick from Stanford University where he is a Professor. Having originally trained as an engineer biochemist, Parag's research is diverse and spans computational and experimental systems biology, cancer biology, and nanotechnology.

Parag talks about the diverse applications of proteomics and the value of bringing together different perspectives and disciplines to tackle challenging problems like biomarker analysis and personalised medicine. He also talks about the importance of and future opportunity for bioinformatics and shares his thoughts on the broader recognition of early detection that started to gain momentum in immuno-oncology but has now expanded to other treatment modalities.

Adam talks to Ola Winqvist, Professor of Cellular Immunotherapy at the Karolinska Institute and Chief Physician of Clinical Immunology at the Karolinska University Hospital.

Ola gives Adam a primer on the immune system, how it responds to disease and infection, and particularly, the role of autoantibodies as biomarkers or targets for some therapies. Ola also talks about the changes he has seen in in the field of immunology over the last thirty years and he shares his thoughts on how Sweden has managed the pandemic.

Adam talks to Dr Richard Roope, a General Practitioner with a special interest in cancer management and Senior Clinical Advisor (for Prevention and Early Diagnosis) at Cancer Research UK. As we find ourselves in the middle of a pandemic, which has put extreme pressure on cancer services globally, Richard discusses our biggest challenge when it comes to cancer management. He also talks about why it is we have seen less referrals for all cancers and lung cancer in particular, and how we can reach out to the missing patients.

Adam talks to Professor Frank Sullivan, Professor of Primary Care Medicine at the University of St. Andrews and Chief Investigator for the Early detection of Cancer of the Lung Scotland (ECLS) trial. Frank talks about the challenges of managing cancer in some of the most deprived communities in the country, why lung cancer specifically, is so difficult to diagnose and why the results of the ECLS trial are so significant.

Adam and Frank also discuss the role that the EarlyCDT Lung blood test could play in helping to overcome the excess burden of undiagnosed cancers we're seeing as a result of the COVID crisis.

Adam talks to Richard Sloggett, former Special Adviser to Health Secretary Matt Hancock, about the changes and challenges facing the NHS in a COVID-impacted world. They discuss policy priorities, the way decision making is shifting from local to regional and how the Government might be able to meet its stated aim of preventing ill-health and improving early diagnosis of cancer.

Adam and Richard touch on the emergence of the diagnostics industry and how it may be the key to driving innovation into the NHS and ultimately be able to deliver batter patient outcomes faster and with more accuracy.