Accelerating Cancer R&D (cont.)

A NEW APPROACH TO CANCER R&D

A noted oncologist before joining Johnson & Johnson in March 2007, Hait has been a catalyst for change, bringing focus and helping to centralize R&D within therapeutic areas. Within oncology, Hait created Tumor Strategy Groups (TSG) focused on three areas of high unmet need: hematological malignancies, lung cancer and prostate cancer. TSGs further specialize by using the tumor micro-environment as the strategic research focus.

“The tumor is no longer viewed as a tumor cell living in isolation. A tumor cell is very close to its environment, and it's using its environment to grow better,” says Hait.

That kind of insight enabled the paradigm-changing scientific progress that led to ZYTIGA^®, validating the TSG approach.

Importantly, Hait also helped open minds to look beyond the company's own labs and invest in science, wherever that science may be.

“Drug development is very competitive and difficult,” says Hait. “One way to be at the cutting edge is not to be walled inside your own brick and mortar. You have to be out there to see the most exciting new things that are developing.”

Collaborations are one way of being out there, and they promise to fuel advances in oncology research and development. For example, an ongoing agreement with the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology fosters oncology research and technology development in the areas of cancer diagnostics, cancer biology pre-malignancies, genetic models of disease and profiles of the tumor micro-environment.

Another important collaboration, announced in January 2011, is with Massachusetts General Hospital to develop and commercialize a next-generation circulating tumor cell (CTC) technology for capturing, counting and characterizing tumor cells found in patients' blood. It will enable CTCs to be used both by oncologists, as a diagnostic tool for personalizing patient care, and by researchers, to accelerate and improve the process of drug discovery and development.

Hait says the key to meaningful collaborations is to have the right people internally. “Like-minded people seek each other out,” says Hait. “At the end of the day it's the terms of the contract, but to get to that point the other company or group has to have confidence that the people they are working with are really experts.”