Over the course of a multi-decade career spanning prominent roles at Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Amgen and Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Abizer Gaslightwala became known for both his focus on commercial innovation and his uncommon humanity. Both are now on proud display at Akari Therapeutics, which Gaslightwala joined in April as president and CEO.
In this excerpt from his podcast conversation with Kinara co-editor Chase Feiger—Gaslightwala’s first after joining Akari—the newly anointed leader discusses his vision for the future of cancer treatment. He also weighs in on a host of broader systemic issues and industry’s responsibility to address them, as well as the increasing importance of preventive care.
(This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. To listen to the full Kinara podcast with Abizer Gaslightwala, click here.)
Chase Feiger: What led you to the life sciences industry?
Abizer Gaslightwala: It was an interesting journey. I’m a chemical engineer by training, but even before I went to college I had this aspiration of being in the life sciences field. One obvious way was to be a physician and treat patients, but I knew that wasn’t my calling in life. I didn’t want to go to med school.
I ended up taking a job not in the traditional engineering of chemicals but in consumer products. I worked for Johnson & Johnson Consumer Products and it was a fun job. I was helping make products that impacted patients and people and babies—baby shampoo, baby lotion, creams. It was an application of chemical engineering in a different way. I got to learn about pharma through the adjacent J&J companies and that’s where I started to coalesce my interest in life sciences with engineering and math and with business.
I got into life sciences through a gradual kind of evolution, and I think that’s really important for anyone in life. You know—you have an idea where you want to go, but you have to try a couple of different experiences. You learn from them and you learn how to orient yourself to where you want to go. When I did find a role in the life sciences industry after graduate school, I spent 20, 25 years building experiences on how we actually bring medicines to market and make an impact on patients.
The most important thing I’ve learned is that innovation is great, but innovation sitting on a shelf or on a bench doesn’t do anyone any good. It’s super important to take that innovation and find ways to bring it to patients, and that’s where I’ve really enjoyed my experiences in the life science industry.
Feiger: When it comes to commercializing novel therapeutics, what keeps you awake at night?
Gaslightwala: We’re in an interesting place as a society—not just in the U.S., but globally—around how healthcare is viewed. There’s increasing cynicism around what companies in the healthcare business do. And you know, it is a profit-driven business. Ultimately we get better products and innovation because it is a for-profit industry, which provides incentives for people to take big risks with R&D. Unless there’s that kind of incentive, we have no new products. We wouldn’t have that level of risk-taking because for every one product that we bring to market, there are many that fail. All those R&D costs have to be recouped by the products that actually get to market. In general, it’s hard to explain and contextualize that.
Another question is, structurally, how do we make sure that healthcare is accessible? Not just drug therapies, but actual diagnosis and screening of cancer. Do people have support services that help them access healthcare? Do they have the health literacy to understand the choices they make?
When you catch cancer early, you have a much better chance of defeating it. There have been a lot of public awareness campaigns around smoking and how it relates to lung cancer, and that’s had a dramatic impact of reducing lung cancer rates. As an industry, how do we become part of the solution with governments and health organizations around creating awareness around diagnosis, screening and treatment? How do we ensure that access is there?
There are many players and it’s a complex problem. I don’t profess to have any answers, but I think we as a society have to make sure we’re not attacking certain players. Let’s try to think about how there are solutions that need to be created in a way that’s beneficial for everyone.
Feiger: But then there are things like reducing financial barriers and increasing clinical trial participation, and how we expand care in underserved areas. The list goes on. What do you see as the three most important problems to solve?
Gaslightwala: Diagnosis and screening are super important, and I’ll give one example. Colon cancer rates in certain demographics have been increasing over the last 10 years. It’s great that in certain demographics of older patients, they’ve actually come down, but in slightly younger groups the increase is a little startling. Why is that happening? Someone might argue diet or lifestyle, but who knows all the reasons. The fact is that if colon cancer rates are going up, it’s so important to get screened, even though this is not the most obvious thing to screen.
Data has shown that earlier detection is better; you have a better chance of defeating it and surviving for longer. Yet most people are probably not aware and their physicians may not be aggressively reminding them “you need to do this.” I had one done recently and it’s not a fun process, but I was happy I did it because they found something.
These are the areas where we can make a big impact: Emphasizing screening, diagnosis and literacy. It drives people to their primary care physician for annual checkups, not just for cancer but for heart issues or diabetes or hypertension. So encouraging preventative care will not only help with cancer, but across the board. I’m not saying that as a life sciences businessperson but as a societal person. I would rather people get healthcare screenings and treat prophylactically versus treatment when they have an issue. It will reduce the cost of healthcare if we do a better job of that.
The second thing is how we ensure that there are the right incentives for our industry to continue to innovate and bring meaningful therapies to people. Our model in the U.S. has been very successful; the biotech industry has been highly productive and innovative because of the model we have in the U.S. So how do we preserve that, and in a way that incentivizes companies to make big bets? Because without those big bets, we won’t see the innovations of tomorrow.
The third thing is the equity of healthcare delivery. This gets into social determinants of health and how we ensure that healthcare is easy to access and useful for people. Just to be realistic, that doesn’t mean it’s always going to be equal for everyone, but we need to have some common denominator of health access for people at a basic level.
Feiger: How do you think about the evolution of oncology care as it pertains to next-generation therapeutics?
Gaslightwala: This is where I think about the intersectionality of tech—of what’s happening in big data and AI—and health. The healthcare industry is a little bit slow to adopt some of this for reasons around regulations and the way data has to be protected for patients, but we’re starting to see it. Now it’s not only about having a great therapy, but how we get better at identifying when those patients present and then reducing the amount of time to get them that therapy. That’s where the world of big data is coming in.
When I talk with oncology providers in various parts of the country, they talk about how they can use their data to identify patients that have diagnoses, that have the biomarker, that have the test. It may not be obvious and it may not be linked, but someone needs to start linking it together.
Now how do I accelerate the patient identification? Can we be better and more intentional about it? Can we be faster? Well, that’s where you see the power of industry working with some of these providers. We’re trying to engage with our customers on how we look at real world data and how they look at the data in their systems. We might help them and give them some parameters, but they protect the data. That’s a win-win because if they can treat these patients earlier with better therapies, that’s great.
We’re able to look at data, aggregate it, analyze it and do things in a more powerful, sophisticated way. It used to be, “Oh, I had this piece of paper and I had a chart, but I got busy doing 15 other patient calls and then it never happened.” That’s the world of the old. How do we start getting to the world of the new, where we let these systems do all the gruntwork and busy work, and help clinicians make the best decision at that point in time?
