Naji Gehchan: Welcome to SpreadLove in Organizations, the healthcare leadership podcast where we explore leadership with purpose.
I am Naji your host, joined today by Vanessa Almendro Navarro, a life sciences executive who builds at the intersection of innovation, AI-enabled R&D, and commercialization. As Vice President and Head of Science & Technology Innovation at Danaher, she leads enterprise innovation and operating-model modernization across a global portfolio. She designed and scaled the Danaher Beacon distributed R&D program with leading academic partners, launched the Danaher Nexus intrapreneurship pipeline, established the Danaher Antibody Capability Center, and created the Danaher Summits to connect operating companies with top domain expertise. Previously, Vanessa co-founded and led the Brain Tumor Investment Fund; served as Head of Strategy & External Innovation at Eisai and Head of Strategy & Operations at Repertoire Immune Medicines; and held scientific and commercial roles at Vertex. Earlier in her career, she was a research fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (University of Barcelona) and an Executive MBA (MIT). She serves on the boards of the Brain Tumor Investment Fund and MIT Sandbox and is a member of the ARM CEO Advisory Council.
01:30
Vanessa Almendro Navarro: Thank you so much. I’m really honored to be here. I’d love to start first with your personal story. What drove you to healthcare where you’ve been having an inspiring career and really a profound impact on people? Sure. Let me share with you the story. And my story actually starts when I was nine years old, very, very young age. And I found my father one day.
01:57
crying in front of my grandparents’ picture. My grandparents died of cancer when my dad was very young, actually. He was 22 or 23 years old. And that image of my father crying to my grandparents’ pictures really um ignited something inside myself. And later in my still young age,
02:26
Vanessa Almendro Navarro: When I started understanding what cancer was, I kind of somehow decided I wanted to do something with my life where I could help others so that they should not be crying in front of their parents’ pictures. So um fast forward, um again, I’m from Spain, from Barcelona. I was the first person in my family going to college. And um during my uh young teenager age,
02:53
The drive was still there. wanted to do to impact. wanted to deliver, you know, something with my professional career that would be helping others. And as I was, you know, going through college, I became a biologist and then I did my PhD as well in molecular biology and cancer. Unfortunately, in my family, there were appearing many more cases of cancer. So, you know, personally,
03:21
It’s been something that has been very close to my heart and my goal as a professional scientist and um now working on the business side of things. As I was evolving my career and I was working in research as well, was um at some point became the head for translational research in uh one of the largest hospitals in Barcelona.
03:49
And that was another point in my life where I felt I had to do something better, more. I had to be faster. Just being in academia, when you are working in a hospital and you are seeing the patients every single day, starts building on you this sense of urgencies. We need to deliver impact. Patients cannot wait. So um I decided to come to the U.S. I went to Dana Farber.
04:18
And I was still, of course, my lapiness pain. I was still in academia, but at Dana-Farber, where I ended up spending six years, every single day where I was going to have lunch in the cafeteria with all my colleagues, I had to pass in front of the pediatric oncology department. That’s in the third floor at Dana-Farber. Again, those first 10 years of my life as a faculty working in academia, I was exposed to patients.
04:46
waiting for solutions. And that was something honestly that at a given point in my life, I could not handle anymore. And I decided to go to industry to continue to learn how do you really go from a good idea to develop a product that can go to the patient’s side and actually deliver that impact I was looking for. um I went to industry. left my…
05:12
career as an investigator, as a faculty, and I had to start over with no industry experience. It was an incredible opportunity. I got to join Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where I was doing research in new target discovery for the oncology portfolio, then transitioning to become a group leader to run a drug development program. But again, um as a scientist, was now working finally in drug development, but I was in the earlier stage of drug development.
05:42
new target discovery and, and, know, lead identification. There was still so much that I didn’t understood about clinical trials. How do you set up a clinical trial to get to the right end point so that you can have the right marketing materials to properly, you know, um, you know, be able to, to distribute those treatments to the right patient populations. How do we think about commercial viability of a drug or a treatment or, know,
06:11
an indication that was something I had honestly, very limited exposure and idea. And again, that, that was this lack of understanding was something that was like, it ignited me another, um, how to put it ignited this, um, desire to keep learning more. were still steps about going from an idea to a product I did not understood.
06:40
So I decided then to transition from research to the commercial department. That was the time as well where I decided to do an MBA at MIT and build that gap into this business acumen and that understanding from the financial perspective that I was lacking at that time. And then from there, honestly, I’ve been then transitioning in my career in roles that have been
07:04
always sitting at the intersection between innovation and commercialization, always trying to find opportunities to go from a good idea to a good product. And at the end, again, just to summarize, it’s always about trying to deliver on patient impact. And it’s not enough to just have a good idea. You need to be able to see it through and develop actually a solution that will impact human health. And that’s really it.
07:32
the, the, inspires me to continue to, to be doing what I do every single day. Well, thank you so much Vanessa for this inspiring story and moving. think several of us have moved to keep on growing our impact and you’re certainly are delivering it. And your, how you’re ending is actually a great segue for my first question, because you’ve built program and we are one of the few who builds program to foster collaboration and
08:00
entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship somehow. So how do you ensure that innovation is really staying, uh not just gutting edge innovation as we hear it, but exactly what you said, deeply connected to patients and societal impact.
08:18
Vanessa Almendro Navarro: uh It’s important, or the way I think about it, it’s always important to understand what is the problem that you are trying to solve. If there is a problem that needs to be solved, there is always the opportunity to develop a solution for that problem. And I said there is always a solution because one of my principles, it’s always um
08:46
don’t tell me no, tell me how. There is always an opportunity to do something and approach the problems. We might fail from a technical perspective, know, science is complicated and very often fails, but there is always an opportunity for us to try and to move forward. So when it comes into innovation, again, it’s important that there is always a problem that needs to be solved and to solve that problem, we might need to really
09:15
go into the wild to develop a novel technology and try to discover something new. But importantly, sometimes there might be simple, elegant solutions that just deliver impact. And I think this is also critically important when we think about developing treatments and just delivering solutions for human health. um Because a challenge that we’ve seen for the past uh five
09:43
to 10 years is that there has been a boom of therapeutic modalities that can be used today to uh virtually treat every single molecule, every single condition, if you think about it. But we lack still the ability to be able to advance these potential solutions to cure as many diseases as we can today, right?
10:11
So it’s important that we don’t as a, you know, as an industry that we continue to invest in trying to match short existing technologies rather than jumping into the next new shiny thing. I do believe that with the right focus, we might be able to really uncover that some existing, maybe less attractive or new technologies can actually deliver a lot of impact. And that’s as well a mindset of
10:41
you know, being pragmatic and always focusing um on solving a problem that, you know, I applied consistently through the innovation programs that I’ve been running.
10:55
So at the intersection of AI, R &D, commercialization, AI is a big topic these days. I would love to get your views since you’re really close to those collaborations and making sure they get, as you’re saying, improved and not only the shiny things, but rather the other technologies to get a patient impact. Really thinking forward for the next five, 10 years, what excites you most about what’s ahead of us? What really excites me, m
11:25
is that uh we are, I think we are very lucky, um honestly, to be living in the time that we are living despite all the existing challenges from a microeconomic and geopolitical situation. We are living in the time where data, artificial intelligence, analytics,
11:49
technology, biotechnology and robotics are really converging into what is going to be an innovation revolution. And what really excites me is how that next future is going to look like. And it’s not going to be a future where we can just continue to do incremental innovation. We have the opportunity today to really rewrite and rethink and redesign how the next, you know,
12:17
hospitals in the future are going to look like at the intersection, as I mentioned before, of robotics, artificial intelligence, data, a different way to manage and monitor health and actually deliver uh treatments for diseases. It’s going to change the way that we think about experimentation. We are going to move towards data first, in silico first, and wet lab as a way for us to validate.
12:45
versus the way that we discover most of the things that we do today that is experimentally right. So I think that for me, what’s exciting is the fact that optionality is going to expand because of the fact of what I just mentioned, this ability to really interrogate biology and, you know, accelerate the adding the cycle so that we can test many more hypotheses faster. So that’s extremely exciting. The cautionary tale though, is that within all this hype, we need to be of course realistic.
13:15
into what are the problems and the solutions that will be truly solved and delivered with the opportunities that we have in front of us and what is hype and a little bit of an emerging maturing aspirational scenario that is going to take a little bit more time to be developed. Is AI automation going to help us to develop many more drugs?
13:42
faster indeed one day, still we need to streamline the way that we get clinical validation of those therapeutic modalities before we can even develop many more of these modalities, right? So I think that there’s gonna be as well this opportunity to ensure that we um tap into what can help us to deliver impact now.
14:10
versus what’s going to require still a much more maturity before we can really deliver impact on, let’s say on AI driven, fully drug development programs, just to speak on an example. Yeah. So I want to double click on that, I fully with you on this acceleration of drug discovery, how we apply AI, and really AI as a tool across all our value chain.
14:36
But that’s something I’d love your thoughts on, which is the clinical side, right? Like discovering all those targets, even being able to drug the undruggable targets now are happening. But then to your questions and what you said on biology, you know, like we are humbled every time we’ve put a molecule or, you know, a technology into humans and how this will work out. So how do you think about this step of first in a human to getting a drug approved?
15:05
through this new AI lens. And did I hear you correctly? Like we will have a lot of new modalities or new targets, but the tough piece will be this bottleneck of making sure that they are clinically relevant and getting to patients’ hands. Yes, exactly. So to be a little bit more concrete, let me pick on a specific example. Let’s think, for example, about how
15:32
we can use, I don’t know, like machine learning algorithms, excuse me, to, um and data analytics in general, just to understand how to optimize sequences, let’s say for gene editing technologies, right? So that’s one modality right now that is extremely important. And we are seeing um more and more what’s the promise that gene editing technologies can deliver. um
16:00
still when we think about gene editing, um the amount of tools, the enzymes, CRISPR-Cas9, base editors, you name it, prime editors, there are many modalities today of editors we can use on DNA, on RNA, that are potentially um able to provide cures to many diseases, but yet we have not
16:27
figure out what’s the opportunity or what are the, how to develop these racks in a way that is, um is going to be safe and for what indications. Some of these assets still, some of these racks are still like clinical validation. That’s the point I’m trying to make. So that’s an example with gene editing technologies. Again, products that we can, there are many AI tools that can be used to understand, know, safety, efficacy, potential.
16:57
you know, toxicity of target effects. So that’s, that’s an area where, we have been using this, type of tools. Another area that it’s important as well, where actually we are seeing an amazing um opportunity is in ligand discovery, right? And everything that alpha fold, bolts models and all these, you know, protein modeling tools have been helping us to understand into how to target proteins.
17:26
and how to design ligands in a much more efficient and faster way and really to expand our ability to understand the chemical space. So that has been an incredible opportunity for us at the front end of the drug discovery. Yet we still, for example, are missing the ability to build that lab in a loop, quick iteration model so that we can validate those virtual hits to continue to advance the drug development programs, right?
17:56
So I think that’s an important consideration at the front end. Then when it comes into your question about the patients, and then even if we are able to sort all these problems and get to the right molecules, something that is more and more important is understanding what is the patient population that is truly going to benefit from your treatment so that we decrease.
18:22
the failure rates that we’ve seen in the past with very promising therapeutic modalities that just failed clinical trials because they were not hitting the right patient population. we know that this has happened in the past in many situations. We know that our understanding of eligible patient populations, our ability to discover um
18:51
and understanding patient pathophysiology and drivers of uh response to these treatments is going to help us to then accelerate, tailor an increased probability of success of these potentially, you know, curative treatments. So when I think about AI to your point before, AI is really an enabler on the full uh cycle of drug discovery from, you know, finding your target, discover your molecule.
19:19
thinking about clinical trial design for patient, you know, again, eligibility, um even at the end, if you will, into commercialization of that particular treatment. But the clinical component, I think it’s gonna be crucial. We are evolving towards, and we are seeing this more and more and more, uh in the possibility for us today to change the way that we think about population health.
19:46
and then trying to figure out how you narrow into treating one patient towards let’s understand first what’s um the right treatment for individual patients and let’s use that patient population, um individualized data to understand larger um patient diseases. So I think that we are changing that paradigm and that’s an opportunity where AI hopefully is gonna help us to do that.
20:15
Certainly, you know, like the field as we’ve been discussing, right, like the field of AI as an enabler. I love this word, how you use that, right? And in different steps of drug development from early to late will be impacting us for better health is really exciting. I want to go, you know, go back to your story, right? Like from early childhood to uh bench science.
20:44
at DNA Farber and now Global Innovation. Is there kind of a guiding principle that really shaped the way you lead and inspire others through your story? um Yes, I would say that um something I have learned from my career that now I try to inspire to my team and my colleagues and my peers, it’s never give up.
21:15
I mean, you know, I was, um as I mentioned before, I went from Spain, from Barcelona, the first person in my family actually going to college, studying biology in a country where at that time there were very limited career opportunities, but I was determined. I wanted to become a biologist. I wanted to go out there. I wanted to do research in oncology. um And then when the opportunity came to come to the U.S.,
21:43
And by the way, I barely speak any English at the time. So I basically came to the U S and had to learn a language. I was not speaking. Um, I never gave up. It’s like, that’s not going to stop me. I’m going to go to the not far. Where this is a great opportunity. Then going to industry, starting over, you know, never give up. will figure it out. That’s, that’s the theme I consistently use with my, with my team. Um, then transitioning careers, starting over again, moving into commercial where I had really limited.
22:13
understanding on marketing and commercial. I did not give up. I continued to push because again, there is always, I like to think about our careers as every moment, the lows and the highs are just a point in time, know, uh a bottom, uh a challenging moment in your professional career. Things sometimes don’t go well.
22:39
It’s just that a moment at some point it’s going to get well. So just keep going. Don’t give up. Keep pushing forward. So why I’m sharing this with you, I’m sharing this with you because as you know, being now working more on business strategy, mostly right, I’m on the other side. I’m actually a scientist by training. I spend many, many years of my career on the bench and I know how frustrating it is when you know that, you know, five to 10 % and that’s for the lucky ones of experiments ever worked.
23:09
um As a bench scientist, you know that you are going to need to try over and over and over again until something works. So that’s point number one. Then you start adding, you know, let me put it this way, probability of success of every single tiny little step from advancing an idea to actually a product. And most of the time you are going to fail. Our jobs, our careers are extremely challenging. We need to build that resilience. It’s always don’t give up, keep going.
23:38
And we will figure it out. And I, that’s the theme I consistently use with, again, with my team, with my colleagues is my personal philosophy. I will figure it out. This is so powerful. We will figure it out. And it’s certainly a story of resilience throughout your life and the journey. And, know, sometimes I think of it the same, very close to what you said, you know, every time we know how to do a job, just…
24:06
are curious enough to go and do something we’ve never done before, but we’ll figure it out. We’ll learn and we grow and we’ll figure it out. I love that. And this is a testament for your great leadership. And talking about this, I’m now going to go to giving you a word and I would love your first reaction to it. And the first one is leadership.
24:27
humble.
24:30
I want to learn more about this because again, you have a phenomenal journey through academia, biotech, pharma, global enterprise, small, large. Has your leadership definition or the different cultures and scales and organization evolved over time? Significantly, yes. um
24:56
When I said humble to leadership is precisely because um as a leader, when I started my career, very, you know, at a very early age, I was like group leader already in the hospital clinic in Barcelona. I was very immature. I was very green. And I thought that leadership was something that candidly it was not. So as I was, you know,
25:26
experiencing my leadership through the different teams. I was running at the hospital with scientists, medical students, then transitioning coming to the US, going to work at Dana Farmer, then transitioning to industry to biotech. I’ve seen, I’ve had to experience different type of teams that I was managing at the time. And that made me to realize that your leadership style cannot be just one. You need to adapt to…
25:56
to the different cultures, the different styles, the different industry settings. And um it took me time to realize that um it’s important that we all adapt as leaders. We are not always right. And it’s really, when I say humble, we need to admit when we are wrong. And it’s a good thing to ask for forgiveness when you make a mistake with your team members.
26:23
And this is something that I’ve learned over the years. And I become really humble to say that it doesn’t really matter where you sit in an organization. No one succeeds because of our individual, let’s say skills. Everything we do is with teams. It doesn’t matter where you sit. doesn’t matter your title, your position. You are another team member and you need to reflect that within your leadership.
26:50
And it’s important to recognize when you have been wrong. And I’ve been wrong many times and I’ve done many mistakes as a manager, but uh I’ve learned how to embrace and admit those mistakes so I can become a better leader in the future. Right. So that’s a little bit, you know, my, my journey, my story. And um unfortunately, I would love to see many more leaders becoming a little bit more humble in, in understanding that.
27:20
We, everyone is always trying to do their best and we need to be able to support. We need to be able to enhance. Of course, we are gonna always be trying to aspire for more and challenge our teams to deliver more, better, faster, because patients are waiting. that sense of urgency is something I’m never going to lose because of the personal story I mentioned before. But it’s really important that leaders recognize when we are wrong.
27:48
and admit that, and if we need to ask for forgiveness, I make a mistake, I’m sorry, we should be doing that. And that’s the way I like to move forward with any team that I manage.
28:01
The second word is impact.
28:05
Patience. The third one is sandbox. Innovation. I’m very traditional, I can see that. And the last one is spread love and organizations.
28:24
Yes, I don’t know why, but philanthropic came to my head. It spread love and organizations, I guess, related to the other big passion of mine that is supporting the National Rintomor Society. Do you want to tell us more about it? Sure, happy to do that. So when I was actually doing my MBA at MIT and I was working at Vertex Pharmaceuticals,
28:49
A very good colleague of mine was the CSO of the National Brain Tumor Society. And he reached out to me and said, listen, Vanessa, the National Brain Tumor Society is thinking about launching potentially a philanthropic investment fund because we want to make sure that we continue to help in advancing ideas from the academic setting to commercialization so that we can deliver more solutions for patients with brain cancer.
29:18
So I got engaged into working with, David Arons is the CEO of the National Brain Tumor Society, Kirk Tanner, who was at CSO at that time and the full organization. And we built this proposal for the board about creating a philanthropic fund to invest in brain cancer enterprises to support seed investments and serious brain cancer companies.
29:47
and make sure that with this investment vehicle, we could connect the work that the National Green Tumor Society is doing today as an advocacy association, supporting with grants, academic institutions, and then build an investment opportunity to take that early research from those academic institutions and be able to support them to create new companies and advance towards commercialization.
30:14
So that was an incredible um experience when I started working with the National Brain Tumor Society in building this, you know, the Brain Tumor Investment Fund. Because brain cancer, as many other cancers, I mean, this is just one of them. There is a huge unmet medical need. And unfortunately, the investment community
30:40
has been traditionally very reluctant to invest too much capital in this disease just because we know it’s challenging, it’s very complicated. But when there is a challenge, we saw an opportunity and the opportunity is that today we understand the molecular subtypes of oh brain cancer. There are technologies today that are allowing us to approach brain cancer very differently. We are seeing in
31:09
incredible progress of CAR-Ts, know, cell therapies providing long lasting uh responses in patients that had no other option. They were destined to really not have any opportunity. And on top of that as well, we are seeing an incredible progress in liquid biopsies and being able today to infer brain biology through, you know, a blood test, which is opening the possibility as well for early diagnosis.
31:39
diagnosis in the future. So with the Brain Tumor Society, what we are trying to do is to continue to inspire the ecosystem. We are a very small organization. We do very, you know, small investments, but it’s all about enhancing the ecosystem, building that momentum and making sure that the rest of the investor community can see what we are doing and they can start also understanding that this is, there is an opportunity today to invest in these enterprises.
32:09
cancer today, brain cancer today, it’s much more attainable than it was 10 years ago with the new technology. So we should continue to invest and help here. Well, thank you for doing that. It’s certainly an area of incredible high on met need and many of us have seen friends or touched by this and it’s great to see those breakthrough advancements and hopefully we will be able to cure one day those cancers. That’s why.
32:38
We do what we do. Any final word of wisdom, Vanessa, for healthcare leaders around the world?
32:48
Um, well, I would say that.
32:55
As healthcare leaders working on innovation, we are very fortunate to be living in the time that we are living today. And I think it’s up to us to really embrace this opportunity and ensure that we rethink and redesign the way that we want to develop treatments and healthcare solutions in the future, considering the tools that we have today.
33:25
It’s up to us. The opportunities are there. The technologies are there. We just need to be able to ensure that we as leaders are focused, that we try to decrease, you know, bureaucracy and administrative barriers. Patients are not waiting. They need solutions, that we are decisive, that we invest with conviction when we know that there is a solution that can
33:53
you know, deliver an impact for a patient. And importantly as well that as society is changing, that we as leaders as well change, the noble generations that are gonna become the leaders of the future, they are different. Society is changing. We as leaders need to change. This humble leadership really understanding that we are just one more piece of the game. We are just one more team player.
34:19
It’s a philosophy on leadership that I think organizations are gonna need more and more and more in the future. Especially um the last thing I want to mention as well as we recognize that we cannot solve for these big problems alone. Everything has to be through collaboration. And again, we are just one more piece in the puzzle. that would be my, you know, um maybe, you know. m
34:44
final note of inspiration for other leaders to think about, you know, what’s all the good and impact that we could deliver if we modernize our way of, you know, um managing teams and running organizations. So that’s it from me. Well, thank you so much, Vanessa. It’s inspiring and really great to us. I always talk about love and discipline. You kind of touch on both between focus and carrying leadership. And I love your framing. Embrace the opportunity of living today.
35:14
because patients cannot wait and really uh great chatting with you and thanks for being with me today. Thank you so much, Nagy. This was fantastic and thank you so much for inviting me. Thanks for listening to the show. For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to spreadloveio.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare one story at a time.
Naji Gehchan: Thanks for listening to the show! For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to Spreadloveio.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare, one story at a time.
Follow us on LinkedIn and connect with us on spreadloveio.com. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and feedback. Most importantly, spread love in your organizations and spread the word around you to inspire others and amplify this movement, our world so desperately needs