Joining Commercialization and Innovation to Bring New Cancer Therapies

In a conversation with CancerNetwork®, Vanessa Almendro-Navarro, PhD, MBA, who recently joined City of Hope as chief commercialization officer, discussed her background as a research fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as well as how her clinical background will impact her new role.

In describing her background as a fellow, she explained that Dana-Farber was one of the few institutions that pioneered research in intratumor heterogeneity, as well as breast cancer stem cell tumor evolution. Initially beginning as a 2-year program, she spent 6 years there, and that experience helped her to establish an understanding of the local biotech ecosystem. Regarding how her clinical background impacted how she thinks about commercialization, she expressed that it fostered a desire to translate scientific discoveries into patient impact, as well as consider how these discoveries impact patient and clinical stakeholders.

Furthermore, Almendro touched upon the impact pursuing her MBA had on her career, particularly buoyed by her desire to understand how a product for use by patients or clinicians can be ultimately derived from an idea during research. She concluded by highlighting some of her past accomplishments, including her experience with Danaher and her involvement with the Musunuru lab to treat the first infant patient with personalized in vivo gene-editing therapeutics.

What was your experience as a research fellow at Dana-Farber, and what drew you to the field of breast oncology?

I joined Dana-Farber in 2013 when I was still faculty at the hospital clinic in Barcelona, Spain. The reason why I joined Dana-Farber at that time was because I was intrigued in understanding intratumor heterogeneity and breast cancer stem cell tumor evolution. Dana-Farber was one of the groups at that time that was pioneering in this research. I joined the organization for what was supposed to be a 2-year fellow program, and I ended up spending 6 years there. It was a fantastic experience, and it helped me to discover the biotech ecosystem within the Boston area; that was very determinant for me to then make the decision to stay in Boston, not go back to Barcelona, and then continue my career here in industry.

How has your clinical and research background influenced the way you’re thinking about commercialization at City of Hope, particularly when it comes to accelerating patient access to promising therapies?

My clinical experience, both at the hospital clinic in Spain and then at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for almost 10 years, helped me to realize that when we want to advance scientific discoveries into patient impact, there are several barriers that we need to overcome. Often, when we think about those barriers, commercialization is thought of as the last step in the process. Commercialization criteria and input are things that should not happen at the end of the ideation and discovery processes; they should happen at the beginning.

For me, that experience helped me to shape the way that I think about advancing innovation towards products that can impact patient care. Importantly, having had that experience working in the clinical setting, it gave me the ability to understand the patient perspective, the physician perspective, [and] the nurse practitioner [perspective]. Most importantly, as well, I can connect that type of information with my experience into how biopharma, biotech, and the venture and investment community think about advancing innovation. That’s… the full context into how that experience can help me in thinking about advancing commercialization at City of Hope.

Within this context, what I’ve come to realize is that there are critical questions that are always important to answer when we think about advancing a specific product. The first question is, who is the ultimate user of that intervention? You might have an innovation that might be impacting the patient directly, let’s say a therapeutic, but there are innovations that [aid] health physicians, nurses, and other health practitioners to deliver care in a different way. It’s important to understand who the ultimate user is and the problem that we are trying to solve. There are many stories and examples where the science can be fantastic, but there is not a clear path to solve a problem that then changes the clinical workflow. Trying to connect all the dots between [who is creating] the innovation, who is going to be receiving the innovation, and then the real-world impact are the 3 lenses that make me think about commercialization in a different way.

The last thing I want to mention is that this research background and that experience also helped me move into the commercialization space to think differently about building flexibility in the discovery process. The reason why the commercial point of view, assessment, evaluation, and input are so critical for the full discovery process is because we need to understand that science fails many times. Sometimes, our hypotheses might not be the right ones. The commercialization point of view can help us to build different types of iterations into the way that we are developing products. It might help us pivot when we discover that perhaps the hypothesis was not true, but we might be able to do something different. That’s why it’s so important to align the identity strategy, unmet clinical needs, and commercialization and use this type of integrated framework to advance innovation towards products that can get into the patient’s bedside.

What prompted you to pursue your MBA, and how has that experience impacted the trajectory of your career?

This is relevant and related to what I just shared about my point of view about commercialization. When I was a translational scientist, and I was at the bench doing amazing research in a cancer care setting, I wasn’t just looking to publish a paper or get a new grant. I was always aspiring to get my science to the patient. What I discovered was that by the time I was a translational research scientist, I didn’t have a clear idea of, “How do you do that? How did you go from having a good idea or a good early discovery into getting into a development path that can lead to a commercial product?” I had no idea how biopharma worked. “How do you develop drugs? How do you think about clinical trials? How do you commercialize drugs?” All that was very new to me.

This was the reason why I decided to leave academia and join the industry. I was trying to understand how to go from a good idea to a good product that can make it to the patient’s bedside. When I was at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, I spent my first 2 years working in the Research and Development Department while doing new target discovery for oncology programs. Then, I started to run drug discovery programs in oncology. Again, even being a translational and applied scientist doing drug development in the pharmaceutical industry was still not giving me the full picture to truly understand and connect the dots: “How do I do the right assessment from an idea to a good commercial product?” I decided to take a leap in my career and move from the research department to the commercial department, trying to fill this gap by truly understanding what drug development means. That was the time I took advantage of to [pursue] an MBA because I recognized that, for me to be able to have that strategic end-to-end thinking and to be able to assist opportunities within all the dimensions that are critical for developing a product, I had to get that business acumen that I was missing.

Having that exposure to commercialization, clinical trials, marketing, and then all the additional aspects that I learned through my MBA at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I was able to finally connect the dots. Since that point, candidly, the MBA gave me the tools that I was missing. I felt much more equipped to use that framework applied to any type of research on science. This impact and this change in my way of thinking about developing products and commercialization is what allowed me to then be able to quickly transition from working in oncology to working in rare disorders, to working in autoimmune diseases, to working in neurology when I was at Eisai. I even took this way of thinking to Danaher Corporation, where I was working in different industry segments: diagnostics, genomic medicines, biotechnology, and biomanufacturing.¹

The short answer: getting this MBA and being able to frame my way of thinking in a much more structured manner, from idea to commercial product, had a huge impact in my career.

What are some studies that you are most proud of, or that you consider your biggest accomplishments?

There are 2 things I’m [quite] proud about that I’ve done in my career. One of the programs I developed at Danaher was the Danaher Beacon Program, where we were establishing partnerships with academic medical centers to develop novel technologies and novel intellectual property that we could quickly translate into products that we could commercialize. That that was one of the programs I led, and one of those Danaher beacons was with Fyodor Ornov, PhD, and Jennifer Doudna, PhD, at the [Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI)].

In working with them, we were developing a new framework to [create] personalized CRISPR gene-editing technologies. That work with them led us to be connected with Kiran Musunuru, MD, PhD, MPH, ML, MRA, and Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, MD, PhD, when they were quickly trying to find partners to develop personalized gene-editing technology for a baby [named] KJ.² KJ Muldoon [was] the first baby ever treated with a personalized gene-editing therapeutic, and it was in vivo gene editing. Of course, everything was led by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia [CHOP], Musunuru, and Ahrens-Nicklas, but I’m proud of this specific contribution. Taking one step back to what I mentioned before, driving the right innovation towards patient impact is something that you cannot do in isolation in a commercial setting. It’s always about collaboration.

This is an example for me that reflects the power of what can be done [when] we have the right problem to solve, the right scientists, and the right strategy: we all collaborate to be able to advance the science. This specific program led to develop not only the first personalized gene-editing technology that was administered in vivo and provided a virtual cure to a baby, but it was done in 6 months, which is unprecedented in the drug development industry.

This specific accomplishment has led to significant considerations from our current administration thinking about how we can enable more personalized treatments. How can we change the regulation? Some of these types of innovations can fully change and create a new field. That’s what we are seeing today with personalized gene-editing technology. My participation [involving] baby KJ and [my involvement with] Danaher Corporation is something I’m extremely proud of.

References

1. Danaher Beacons: the best of academia and industry. News release. Danaher. April 24, 2025. Accessed February 12, 2026. https://tinyurl.com/34sh3stj
2. World’s first patient treated with personalized CRISPR gene editing therapy at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. News release. Penn Medicine. May 15, 2025. Accessed February 12, 2026. https://tinyurl.com/y93bznx9