Facilitating Commercialization Through Collaboration in Oncology

In a conversation with CancerNetwork®, Vanessa Almendro-Navarro, PhD, MBA, who recently joined City of Hope as chief commercialization officer, discussed what she is most looking forward to accomplishing with her new role. She explained that, in tandem with making commercialization more expedient, she is hoping to create a more collaborative ecosystem within City of Hope.

Instead of only acknowledging the efforts and contributions of a single department, Almendro envisions creating a “best team wins” mentality to stave off this practice. She further emphasized that commercialization is an ongoing process within the development of a product as opposed to the last step, which presents further opportunities for collaboration within an “eager organization”.

Transcript:

In addition to helping to commercialize innovation faster, one of the areas I am excited about, and has somehow been a recurrent theme within my career, is that I’m an extremely collaborative person. I truly believe that collaboration is the path forward to advance faster. In all the different types of strategies that I have advanced in my prior organizations, I was always careful about thinking on the cultural component. In thinking about creating a collaborative ecosystem, [I am] trying to bring together the different organizations within City of Hope and create a machine where we are all integrated in a collaborative way, where we embrace the concept of the best team wins, rather than individual departments, which is somehow what happens in these type of settings.

This is something I am excited to work towards: to build that more integrated collaborative engine. Not only is this important for the success, as I mentioned before, about everything we do; commercialization is not the last step. Commercialization is across the full development cycle for any product. What excites me as well is that so far, [being in my fifth] week at City of Hope, [I see] this is an extremely eager organization to think differently, to advance patient impact. The willingness is there. Something that I am excited [for] is in changing City of Hope, in building that new ecosystem where we can interact and be connected in a more efficient and fluent manner to advance innovation together. That’s very exciting.