E10 Changing Cultures & Curing Cancer
Nearly three decades ago, Sara Kenkare-Mitra made a life altering decision to follow her passion for medical sciences. She left India and moved to Austin, Texas to attend pharmacology school. Upon completion of her PhD, she was offered a job with Genentech where over the years she pursued roles in designing cancer treatments becoming a leader in her field. Now, Sara oversees dozens of drugs in development and helps determine the viability of new treatments.
In this interview, Sara describes the long journey required for drug approval, the importance of celebrating failure along the way, and how her leadership has developed over the course of her career.
Sara received her PhD in Biopharmaceutical Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco, where she also stayed on as a Post Doctoral Fellow in Clinical Pharmacology before joining Genentech. Sara has worked for Genentech for 21 years, creating drugs that save lives and make the world a better place.
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
I definitely hope that in 10 years, we are at a place where a majority of the cancers, or the big cancers are very well treated, where it becomes a disease that… Like a chronic thing that you may live with. It may not be gone, you may not be like cured, cured, but where you can live with it and have a long lifespan. That's my hope.
Don MacPherson:
If you’ve ever wondered what separates top performers from everyone else, you probably discovered it is just a couple differentiators that determine wild success from average results. My name is Don MacPherson, and for two decades, I've been working with executives to help them optimize performance at the individual, team, and organization levels. Now I interview exceptional people from all walks of life so we can learn from them. Welcome to 12 Geniuses.
This is the best time in human history to be alive. One of the reasons for that is the incredible advancements in medicine. There are a few things in life, more frightening than sitting in a doctor's office and being diagnosed with a life-threatening disease like cancer. Just under 2 million people in the United States will receive that diagnosis this year. Fortunately, for those patients, there's an incredible army of scientists around the world, developing new treatments to extend their lives and cure their disease. Today's guest is one of those scientists.
Sara Kenkare-Mitra is senior vice president of development sciences at Genentech. In this episode of 12 Geniuses, Sara will share her story of how she came to America from India, how she rose to lead one of the most important pharmaceutical research teams in the world, and how we are doing in the battle to cure cancer.
Sara, welcome to 12 Geniuses. Can you start by telling us about where you grew up, what it was like in India when you were growing up, and how you came about to move to the United States?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Sure. Yeah. So, I grew up in a city that’s actually very well known, it's the City of Mumbai. In those days, it was called Bombay. And growing up in India, I grew up in a fairly conservative family where, in general, women and men were treated very equal. My brothers and I, we had a great… My parents were very, very supportive of both genders, etc., but it was a time where, in general, girls would be expected to finish their education and start a family and generally take care of the family.
That was just the general expectation. It didn't mean that women didn't do things other than that. I, right from a very early age, remember that I just loved science and math. I mean, to the exclusion of other subjects, which purely were things I had to do to get to the next grade, etc., but I truly used to love math and science. From a very early age, it was very clear to me that I enjoyed those topics. I went to the science sort of stream in college, and then I actually was interested to become a physician and become a doctor, but I didn't go to medical school. I ended up going to pharmacy school.
So. I went to pharmacy school and I got a great education in pharmaceutical, sort of sciences. It was very clear to me that, that was not sufficient. I wanted to go further. I wanted to do research. The number of institutes that do research in India, at least at that time, was not pretty high. And that's when I decided that I needed to look outside of India and ended up coming to graduate school here.
Don MacPherson:
How old were you when you came to the United States?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
I was 21 years old when I came to the United States.
Don MacPherson:
You went from Mumbai to Austin, Texas, is that correct?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Mumbai to Austin, Texas. To be honest, that my parents were not very sure about this journey of going to the U.S. Looking back, I understand, I was quite young actually, when I started the application process. Unlike today, where we didn't have the internet and the connectivity issues were not there. I was a girl. It wasn't clear to them that this made sense. So, I had to work through a lot of negotiation with them to let me go, which included, if I had a scholarship, if everything was covered, I would be able to go. Luckily, I got into about three universities with a fair amount of scholarship that I wouldn't have to pay any money of my own.
One of them was the University of Texas at Austin. My parents agreed at the end because I had a teaching assistantship and all my fees were covered, and I also got a scholarship to travel. So, I didn't have to really look for additional funding or loans and things like that.
Don MacPherson:
Did your father have the same reservations that your mother did or were they different?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
They both had reservations. My father had traveled outside the country for his job. So, he had sort of been to Europe, etc. And while, on one hand, he realized that I would probably get the education I wanted and he knew I had the potential. He also feared for me to leave the home. It was the first time I was leaving home. I hadn't even lived outside my home. So, yeah, they were very nervous about it. And when I came to the U.S., I mean, I could barely speak with them for like five minutes every week, once a week. The first six months were very challenging.
Don MacPherson:
Can you talk about the culture, maybe shock is too strong of a word, but the cultural differences moving from Mumbai all the way to Austin?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
The cultural piece that was different, that I really enjoyed is just the freedom to do things, the ability to really question things. I think India, in general, is a very old historic culture. Therefore, there are things you do and things you don't do and things you just don't question. There are rules of how you live and what you’re taught as a child. It's not like those rules don't exist here, but you can question them. For me, that freedom to just question and find myself and what's right, and what I enjoy and what's correct for me, was unbelievably liberating.
Don MacPherson:
Moving from one culture to a radically different culture must have trained you to be resilient. How has the resilience helped your success?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Particularly in this industry, I work in the pharmaceutical industry, most drugs that become drugs or become medicines, usually have a lifecycle of around 14 years or so. Some of them never even get into this lifecycle. They are gone maybe in the first year or two. But those that become successful take a very long time. So, I always say that it's an industry of guts. It's an industry of resilience because it takes a very long time to make a medicine. And if you do not have that resilience, you will give up. So, in some ways, I feel like that trait of resilience resonates really well with my career, of what I do. And it sort of comes handy in my day-to-day work.
Comes handy at those times where I'm feeling like, wow, this is never going to happen. We are never going to move there. And it's that trait of resilience, which is really getting up, dusting yourself, and just moving. That's been very, very handy for me.
Don MacPherson:
Let's talk about Genentech a little bit. We are sitting here in South San Francisco in your office. You've been with the company for 20 years. What's been your career path. How did you get here?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
My coming to Genentech was completely by chance. I actually did look at Genentech at the beginning when I was a student at UCSF. I was very interested in Genentech. I'd heard about it. It was here. It was founded by people from UCSF. I came by and met a few people, but nothing came out of it. It was just a curiosity. I then moved on to do a fellowship in clinical pharmacology at UCSF. It was towards the end of that fellowship, and a couple of years later, that Herceptin, this drug got approved from Genentech. All through my pharmacy career, I'd studied a lot about small molecules and I'd never really learned anything about antibodies and these macromolecules. We had learned about sort of this concept of magic bullets, drugs that, at some day, you could have drugs that are targeted to your diseased area.
Never really seen anything like that. It was sort of like science fiction. And here it was in the news, this drug, Herceptin, which was essentially an antibody that binds to HER2 receptor, which is on the surface of breast cancer cells. And it's not in all women. It's in a certain percentage of their population. But if you knew a woman had a HER2-positive breast tumor, then Herceptin actually completely changed the course of their disease. This was supposed to be a disease that has really poor prognosis, but when you give them Herceptin, then today, HER2-positive breast cancer is one of the very curable or treatable sort of diseases, right? I see that in the news, and those days, it was the newspaper. And I was like, “Cool, this is unbelievable.”
I want to be there because I have no idea how they do this. That's the kind of stuff I want to do. Like, if I want to go, what's the next thing I would do? That's the thing that I would do. I actually got a call from Genentech, from a recruiter, completely out of the blue. It wasn't like I even applied, and said, “Hey, we have this position, would you be interested?” I just hopped on it. I said, “I'm going to come and interview for this position.” And that's how I got my job at Genentech. It was as a scientist. I started as a scientist.
Don MacPherson:
So, you were an individual contributor at that time?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Yes.
Don MacPherson:
And then how did you progress from there?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
From there, when I came in, I was a scientist, you can call it an individual contributor. I was a manager. I had a couple of reports, but it was very, very small group. I got involved immediately with a number of projects, etc. My next role came into management. That group grew over the period of time and to the point where ultimately, I ran my first sort of smallish group. I was an associate director. I would say that I had really good managers that saw the potential in me, both as a scientist, but also as someone that can develop and group people.
Don MacPherson:
Can you describe the organization you're leading now in terms of the size of it and the complexity of it, and even maybe geographic locations of it?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
The group, which I lead right now, is called development sciences. It's a translational organization. And we are a organization of about 550 people. Majority of those are in South San Francisco, but we also have teams in Basel and other parts of Europe, as well as a small team in China. But the bulk of it is right here in South San Francisco. The organization is responsible for all the translation activities that happen from drug discovery, through the development process, both non-clinical and clinical, all the way through approval. The fun part is that we get to see molecules right from their inception, all the way through the time when they become drugs. And not only drugs that are sold here in the U.S., but sold in countries all over the world. And that access to reach patients around the globe has been amazing.
Don MacPherson:
You mentioned when you came to Genentech that you were a scientist and that you only had a couple of people you were managing. What were the competencies required to be successful then?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
When I first came to Genentech, I would say that my technical background, sort of scientific thinking and the ability to use it creatively, etc., I think just curiosity and learning, as I said, there was so much to learn. One may be a scientist, but to become a drug developer, it takes years. And really applying your scientific thinking to drug development. I still had a lot of learning to do. But I brought my scientific thinking, I brought my sort of curiosity and ability to learn, and just the technical knowledge that I had to the table.
Don MacPherson:
And now managing or leading a group of 550 people, I'm assuming the competencies are quite different than what made you successful as a scientist.
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Yeah, absolutely. I would say that technical knowledge never gets off the list, at least at Genentech. I think having that scientific and technical knowledge and the depth, and sort of the experience to tell what decisions to make, etc. But then I'll add things like decision-making. Decisions keep getting more and more complex. Decisions get bigger, so the impact of those are much greater. The other ones I would say is ability to think strategically. Then finally, the last one I would say is prioritizing.
Just because of the job and the level of the job, as well as the different new, as you can imagine, we have, at one point in time, we have got about 80 programs going on, right? So, there's just so much going on across so many different areas that my need to prioritize is very high. So, really being able to prioritize quickly and focusing on what's the most important thing that needs to get be done and needs my attention is very key.
Don MacPherson:
I'm surprised to hear you say that technical competence is still important because it seems like it would be almost impossible to keep up on technical competence across an organization as broad as what you're leading now. How do you do that?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Yeah. I totally agree with you. That's why I always say that it's impossible to be sort of the specialist at all of these, but what I consider myself a specialist at is drug development. And you do that through experience, you do that through continuing to read and keep up with what's going on in the external world, learning from other industry counterparts, studying up and continuing to do that. I think that's the way I keep up.
Don MacPherson:
You've accomplished a lot in your career. What one or two things stand out most that you're most proud of?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
I was working mostly with what are called small molecules or traditional, sort of, molecules that you… Drugs that you take as pills, etc. So, most of my original training was with small molecules. I had never worked with antibodies or these big large molecules biologics. Somewhere in my career, I started to get more and more experience with those. And there was a program that I got the opportunity to lead and then be a part of. This program was the first time we were going to take an antibody and put a very toxic small molecule, attach it to the antibody. The idea was that the antibody would be sort of like a carrier that would go bind to this receptor that was on the tumor cell. And then the drug was a payload it was carrying that would enter the cell and the tumor cell would be killed.
If you just gave that drug directly to the patient, it would be very toxic, but by attaching it to the antibody, it was safely carried to exactly the place it needed to be, sort of dumped and killed the cell. So, it was a very interesting concept and I got the opportunity to lead it. Part of the fact was that, because I had experience in small molecules, it was kind of a thing that allowed me to say, “Hey, I would love to do this.” So, as luck would have it, the program died three months after I took the lead on it. People said, “Oh, this is not going to work.” And the few people that were on the team, including myself, just refused to give up. And we said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. We think we know how to make this work.”
So, we went back to management and we told them, “We would love to make this work, can we get a little bit of resource?” And they gave us some time and some money and said, “Okay, go away.” And we came back in six months with two compounds, exactly the same, but we'd retooled it such that we said, “One of these will work.” And they chose both of them, eventually turned out only one move forward. And that became a drug. It's a drug called Kadcyla. It's in the market. It's actually also for women with HER2-positive breast cancer. And I'm just really proud that we persisted. We were trying something very innovative. We were doing something that hadn't been done. And it's a drug that's helping women today. That's one of the things that, when I look back, I don't think I'll ever forget, sort of, the pride in something you were the core group of people that made that discovery of that molecule and that it actually is a drug today.
Don MacPherson:
Our guest today is Sara Kenkare-Mitra, Senior Vice President of development sciences at Genentech. When we come back from this short break, we will discuss why it's good to celebrate failure, the progress the pharmaceutical industry is making in its quest to cure cancer. And Sara will share her advice to women who are interested in careers, in leadership, and in the stem field.
This is the best time in human history to be alive. People are living longer, healthier lives, millions of people are escaping abject poverty every year, and diseases that used to be a death sentence are on the ropes. But the world is changing quickly, too. Artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, 3D printing, the internet of things, and a host of other technologies will change the way we live and work. Is your organization ready for it? 12 Geniuses isn't just a podcast. We're an organization that educates leaders about the changing world of work, so you can harness new technologies, demographic changes, and innovative business models. To learn how 12 Geniuses can help prepare your leadership team to take advantage of the changes that will shape the next decade, check us out at 12geniuses.com.
We're back with Sara Kenkare-Mitra. Sara you've spent your career in cancer research. And during that time, the pharmaceutical industry has made incredible advancements to treat diseases that were once considered untreatable. I'd like to ask a question that never seems to go away, and everyone still wants to know, why is cancer so hard to treat, and when will there be a cure?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Firstly, I don't think that the biology of cancer is fully understood. We've made a lot of progress, but there’s still… Every time a drug is introduced, we still realize there's stuff that we just don't know. And there's incredible advances happening in technology, etc., where I believe that the pace has grown. So, it's like we are learning faster, but we still don't know a lot. That's number one. Number two is that cancers tend to, just like HIV, etc., they tend to mutate. So, you may think you've got a treatment for cancer. And next thing you know, comes back with a mutation that's completely different.
I think part of it is the ability to figure out the right cocktails and know that that was the whole reason for the cancer, which we still are, at this time, for us to understand that.
Don MacPherson:
Do you see any treatments that are on the horizon that would be game changers in terms of treating cancer?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Well, there's a whole paradigm shift that's happening, this whole concept of immunotherapy and the whole idea that we've known for years that the immune system has a way of surveying the body and keeping cancers in check. And that, at some point, that the breaks on that are moved and then your cancer tends to grow. So, the idea is that find ways to make your own immune system more powerful in killing the cancers. That's sort of the layperson’s way of saying, there are some really cool ideas that are going on right now, even at Genentech and other companies such as personalized vaccines, where we can actually take each person's tumor, look at the new antigens or the new antigens that are cancer-specific antigens that are on that tumor, and then make a vaccine very specific for that tumor.
I mean, this gets as personalized as you can imagine, and find a way to see if that person's immune system, which is targeted now for their own personal tumor would take care of it. It's not a straight path. We don't know what will work and what won't. There still is going to be a lot of retooling and iterations here. But this idea of immunotherapy is certainly one that excites me.
Don MacPherson:
We talked a little bit about failure. And one of the most fascinating aspects of drug discovery is that scientists fail, and they fail a lot. Can you give us an idea of how many failures it takes to make an important discovery in pharmaceuticals?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
10%. If you take the entire cycle, only 10% of what you start with will ever become a drug. So, oftentimes, when we have failures happen, we want to fail, but we want to fail early. All the work that we do is to figure out, can we fail in the early stages? The preclinical phases before we ever go into patients. And if we go into patients, maybe as early, but not like in the phase three, which is the final stage, the big trials that happen. Our goal is to fail fast. Fail early. We are going to fail. Our failure rates are probably one of the highest in any industry. But we learn from every failure and each failure teaches us something that helps that same program or different programs.
Don MacPherson:
What advice do you have for leaders outside your industry to help them use failure within their teams for learning opportunities?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Yeah. I would say it’s a still are very humbling process, right? I still have teams that really struggle when their molecules fail, and particularly if they fail late, it's very challenging. We try, so firstly learn from failures. Doing lessons learned and sharing those as much as possible. Also, celebrating failures. Something I learned along the way is that you really need to be… Oftentimes, we are a winning culture so we often give big kudos and emails go around, way to go, for things that worked. But when something doesn't work, we generally send like, “Oh, it didn't work.”
There's like pin-drop silence at that point. So, what we've done is we've tried to have all these similar celebration. We'll have like a nice champagne celebration for the team that had the failure because they still did an incredible job, they learned a lot, and we encourage those lessons learned and things for them. But we celebrate the fact that they got it to this point. And there's a lot of learning that they can take back. People get up, it might be a week where they're down, but once they've gotten past that, they get up and get going again because they know they've learned a lot.
Don MacPherson:
I've learned that you practice meditation and it seems like it's becoming one of these things that's very popular among leaders these days. How is meditating making you a better leader?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
What it does for me is that it helps me calm down when there's so many things in my head at the same time, which is generally the case. I'm thinking about at least 10 things at one time. Given the pace at which we run these days, you end up not being very thoughtful and mindful about what you do. I don't like things that way. I want to know that I'm really paying attention to things that are important. So, I found that, when I meditate, I tend to… Everything is like snowfall, everything just kind of settles. And then the real important things become very clear to me. That doesn't take more than five minutes of meditation.
Don MacPherson:
Over your career, has being a woman been an advantage in any way?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
So, I don't think it's an advantage as much as… Because most of the skill sets that we have, I don't believe that they are female skill sets or male skill sets. I believe we all have range of skill sets, and then we grow them based on our experiences and based on things that we go through, etc., so I don't think being a woman has been an advantage.
Don MacPherson:
Any disadvantages?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
At a time in my career, I noticed that there were some things that I would do, or not do, which probably came from being a woman or a young girl, and also additionally, growing up in a country with a different culture. For example, really being bold about speaking up, feeling comfortable in a room where everybody's talking, to really make sure your voice is heard. Those were things that, as a woman, in general, I found women struggle with those issues. And then, particularly if you take women from cultures where they were told you shouldn't be heard, etc., becomes more challenging. I definitely had things that I had to… They worked against me and I had to overcome them. It was less about the environment and more about just being a woman that had grown up in a different culture.
Don MacPherson:
How did you overcome them?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
By being very thoughtful about them.
Don MacPherson:
Self-awareness indeed.
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
It's a self-awareness. I did take a little bit of coaching at that time, specifically on these items so that I learned how I do things. I didn't want to completely modify my style. I've never tried to do that, because it is important for me to stay as authentic as I am, but see if there were tweaks that would enable me to come at it differently.
Don MacPherson:
What advice do you have for girls or young women who are considering a career in the STEM fields?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
I would say that the one piece I noticed, because I mentor a lot of kids, is tenacity and resilience is important. Patience is important. It is not a career you get in quickly and have quick rewards. You have to learn to stay for the long-term.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. That's quite evident with 90% failure rate, right? You have to be, be resilient. There probably have been plenty of times when you were the only woman in a room full of men. This is a situation that might be intimidating for women early in their career. What advice do you have for them as they face this situation?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Yes, I have been, particularly as I became more senior in leadership, that was when I started to notice that I would be in a room where I would be maybe one of two women, or sometimes just the only woman in the room, I would say, in the beginning, I would feel quite intimidated. And I also learned later on in life, as we've been doing a lot of women in science, kind of initiatives, it's a minority effect. So, it could completely reverse. For example, if you were the only man in a room full of women, you would feel equally intimidated and conscious. It's not whether it's a male or a female, it's because you are the minority in that room that you feel that way. So, one is just understanding that made that different.
The second thing is, when this first happened, I noticed that there were stylistic differences between the men in the room and myself. And you realize, initially I thought about, well, how do I want to be in this room such that I'm an equal participant in a room? So, I made that very thoughtful. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Many women might say, “Oh, just change your style and to be a little bit more masculine, etc.” I was not very comfortable with that. I really believed that my style was the right style for me. So, I decided that I wanted to keep my style as authentic as it was, but just tweak it, as I said earlier, tweak it such that I'm heard.
I made a special effort to get to know each of the members individually so that they sort of knew who I was. And that made it much easier because then the sort of this, oh, I'm a female, they're males, just went away. I was just one of them. I made sure my voice was heard. I was as open as anybody else. And then on, it was never challenging. It was usually the first time when they don't know you and you feel like you're the only female in the room, but in places like Genentech, I mean, generally, that hasn't been an issue for me because it's always… The discussions become very data based, and when data is involved, it doesn't really matter who's at the table.
Don MacPherson:
Just by observation alone, I've noticed that a lot of women don't stand up for themselves when it comes to raises, asking for raises, or demanding it when they deserve it, or asking for a promotion. Did you ever have an instance where you felt like you couldn't stand up for yourself when you felt like you deserved something? Or how did you overcome that? Or maybe my observation is completely false.
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
No, your observation is not false. I've actually observed the same. I will say that I personally have not had that situation. I think that I've always been very open and frank, if there was something I was interested in or an opportunity that I was interested in, to be open about it without feeling like there needs to be reciprocation. But I was very open about my needs about something. But I have seen it in my own groups too, where I've seen that women sometimes can be shy about things like that, being open, and clear about opportunities or about pay raises, etc. I think your observation is right on. Personally, I've not had this problem, only because I think that, if it came up, I've usually been very open about resolving it.
Don MacPherson:
So, what advice would you have for a woman who needs to advocate for herself?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Yeah, I think, I would say that women generally, and I'm not stereotyping everybody, not everyone is like that, but if you tend to be someone that thinks that I'll just wait for someone to ask me, that's not going to happen. And not because you're not good, etc., people are just very busy. I think it's really important to be upfront and proactive and state your goals. And be open and discuss with your managers or your mentors, etc., so that people know the direction you want to head, even if that may not be within your reach, but maybe they'll help you to figure out what kind of opportunities you may want to take to get there, etc. But it's not going to happen if you don't speak about it.
Don MacPherson:
Before we started rolling the tape, we talked about being a mother, and I believe your daughter is 24 now, how did she change your leadership style or your leadership competency capabilities?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
In my case, my daughter has some special needs. And from the time that she was born, I, in addition to just raising a child, raising a child that has challenges, added a level of complexity that initially I was very worried about, but as I look back, in hindsight, I think it really honed a lot of my leadership qualities. I think I had some that were natural and some that just got better because I became more focused. I learned advocacy because I have to advocate for her.
I am more compassionate because of understanding when a person has challenges with speaking or walking, etc., just being more compassionate and understanding, but yet, being strong and clear when you have to be. I also learned to prioritize even better. I mean, with all that was going on and has been going on in my life, prioritization and focusing on sort of the big things, and trying to not sweat, and I use the word trying because it's not always easy, trying to not sweat the small stuff became very, very valuable. I consider becoming a mother and, in particular, a mother of a special needs child has been sort of a gift to my leadership in some ways.
Don MacPherson:
You talked about compassion. And empathy and compassion, I think, often go hand in hand. Some of the research that I've seen is that, as access to information, artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent, empathy becomes a bigger factor in successful leadership, so I find it interesting that you talked about compassion, and I'm sure that has helped you as a leader. One of the things that I would imagine is that, when you think about scientists, you don't necessarily think about compassion and empathy going hand in hand, but maybe you could talk a little bit about how empathy has influenced you, influenced your leadership capabilities.
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Being a leader in any profession requires empathy. In the healthcare profession in particular, I think that empathy goes even beyond your group, because when you're thinking about data, it's not just any data, it's a patient's data. So, empathy also plays a large role there because I, speaking for myself, when I'm sitting at any decision-making committee, I also keep the patient in mind. It's not just about the scientific data that I'm seeing, but remembering that it's connected to someone's life, and some patients, and the sort of the immense sense of responsibility that brings when you are at that table.
Don MacPherson:
We've talked a lot about cancer during the course of this interview. Where do you see cancer in 10 years?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
I can tell you what I hope.
Don MacPherson:
Yes.
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
I definitely hope that in 10 years, we are at a place where the majority of the cancers or the big cancers are very well treated, where it becomes a disease that… Like a chronic thing that you may live with. It may not be gone, you may not be like cured, cured, but where you can live with it and have a long lifespan.
Don MacPherson:
Well, that's a great hope. And based on your experience, when you look back 10 years, are we on the trajectory to get where you want to go 10 years from now?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
I think we're definitely on the trajectory. We may not get there exactly in 10 years, but I think we are on the right path. I think the pace is picking up. I think, sort of the scientific advances in our ability to understand tumors and their genomics, and this new immunotherapy and completely new line of treating cancers, we definitely are on, on the trajectory. Given the time it takes to make drugs, it's challenging. The FDA has been very, very instrumental more lately in trying to get breakthrough designations and helping companies to move faster through this process. I think, if we can work against the clock in some way and make this happen faster, it'll be a huge thing for patients.
Don MacPherson:
Last question for you. If you were to meet someone diagnosed with cancer, what words of encouragement would you have for him or her?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Yeah, if I meet someone that has, and I have friends that have been diagnosed with cancer, firstly, I would say, at least we can say you're living in a time where we know much more and there's much more that you can do to treat these cancers, right? So, it’s like blessed to be in a time where science allows us to know much more about your cancer. And secondly, there's more treatments, and better treatments available that will help you. I mean, I think statistically, there are more people living with cancer today than they did 10 years ago. So, that is also an advantage. The healthcare system is set up to help people with cancer to actually get through those treatments. I would say hold hope and try and look for good treatments that are available, and don't lose hope.
Don MacPherson:
Where can people learn more about you or about Genentech?
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
For Genentech, they can go to www.gene.com. And certainly, they can learn about me, either on the gene.com website or on the internet, I guess.
Don MacPherson:
I know your presence is available online because I've read a lot about you in preparation for this interview. Sara, thank you for being a genius.
Sara Kenkare-Mitra:
Thank you.
Don MacPherson:
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