New Leadership At The Cancer Research Institute

By Ben Comer, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader

Dr. Alicia Zhou, Ph.D., the new CEO at the Cancer Research Institute (CRI), aims to bring her experience in academia and the West Coast health tech startup scene to bear on a 70-year-old nonprofit institution with deep roots in cancer immunotherapy. Her experience using Big Data to improve molecular therapeutics, in both the academic and startup settings, has the potential to help CRI make even more of an impact in the future. “I felt like [the CRI] was underappreciated as an institution, and a lot of folks had never heard of it,” says Zhou. “One of the things I feel that I can really change is to raise awareness within the scientific community, and the lay community, about what CRI is doing.”  

Zhou did her cancer research training at MIT, Harvard, and UCSF, and focused for 15 years on breast cancer and molecular biology, before joining a San Francisco-based health tech startup called Color ten years ago. The goal at Color, says Zhou, was to “democratize access to germline genetic testing,” such as testing for cancer predisposition, and helping people understand what those results mean. In her role as chief science officer at Color, Zhou became a PI on the NIH’s All of Us Research Program five years ago, which provided additional experience around educating study participants about how and when to access genomic cancer predisposition data, and how to use it to improve individual health.

CRI’s scientific advisory council — led by 2018 Nobel Prize winner James P. Allison, Ph.D. — as well as the scientists who receive grant funding from the institute, is impressive, and made Zhou want to be “invited to that party.” As a nonprofit, CRI is “uniquely positioned to convene a field or a space together to really move it forward,” says Zhou. That’s important, since oncology has become increasingly fragmented, with individual researchers and industry scientists working on siloed patient cohorts and therapeutics. “You end up with drug companies that are putting together very small cohorts to target very specific pathways, or specific tumor types, or specific molecules … which means we’re losing the ability to share those insights. I felt that being part of a nonprofit would allow me to try to bring the right folks to the table, to try to defragment the system instead of breaking it into smaller pieces.”

Zhou is interested in using her experience with large data sets to help build open access data assets and tools at CRI that could be useful to drug developers. Working in the startup space, Zhou recognized the value of incubators, which provide specialized talent to help startup companies fill gaps. At CRI, Zhou envisions the potential for an incubator model that could, for example, lend staff data scientists to pure science labs, helping improve data-driven research capabilities where they don’t yet exist.

Building On Legacy

CRI’s history and legacy is firmly rooted in cancer immunotherapy. Outgoing CEO Jill O’Donnell-Tormey led the organization as CEO for more than 30 years, a period of enormous activity and success in cancer immunotherapy development. I spoke with her about some of those emerging therapies in 2014.

Just two weeks into her CEO role (at the time of our conversation), Zhou says its useful to “make a list of problems that need to be solved,” and then cross-reference that list against problems a given organization — in this case CRI — is uniquely positioned to solve. “Sometimes you see mistakes where an organization might really want to tackle a specific problem, but the organization is not resourced or staffed properly” to get it done. “With CRI, I have to learn which things we are uniquely positioned to do, and cross-reference that list with my list of problems that are worth solving,” she says. “Immunotherapy is our competency … but because oncology is becoming much more systems focused, with cross functional treatment plans, by necessity, CRI will need to become experts in and care about all of these other areas of therapeutics,” including ADCs and radiopharmaceuticals, for example.

Early cancer detection is also an important piece of the cancer puzzle; not just identifying cancer earlier, but also developing better and more precise personalized therapies and combinations, notes Zhou. “That is probably what I’m most excited about, not one particular diagnostic tool or therapeutic, but starting to bring it all together. It requires a new way of thinking about treatment, drug development and diagnostics development … we need to bring everybody to the table.”

Biopharma Convener

CRI will continue to be a friend to the biopharmaceutical industry under Zhou’s leadership and will help bring together different players in pursuit of common goals. “You're going to have academics doing preclinical studies that are super promising and that deserve to be taken into the clinic, and that requires biopharma partnership,” says Zhou. “On the flip side, the pharma companies really need that expertise from the academic clinicians, and access to patients from the oncologists themselves.”

Zhou says she wants people to recognize CRI as a place where people and partnerships are convened. “I do think we should be doing a lot more strategic partnerships with industry, in addition to all the funding that we do for academia.”