Change Makers Elcin Barker Ergun of Menarini Group on Driving a New Renaissance in Healthcare
WebMD Chief Medical Officer John Whyte, MD, MPH, speaks with Elcin Barker Ergun, CEO of the Menarini Group, in Florence, Italy, about what they believe to be a new renaissance in healthcare.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/994284?src=soc_yt
— TRANSCRIPT —
John Whyte, MD, MPH: I’m Dr John Whyte, and you’re watching Change Makers: The Future of Health. The Renaissance was a historical time of rebirth in science, art, music, and technology. It witnessed amazing advances in all of these areas. I’ve been wondering lately: Are we perhaps in a new renaissance in health and healthcare, particularly as it relates to diagnostics and therapeutics for cancer, heart disease, obesity, and infectious disease? My guest today believes that we indeed are. Elcin Barker Ergun is the president and CEO of the Menarini Group. I met with her at their headquarters in Florence, Italy, widely regarded to be the birthplace of the Renaissance. She shares her excitement about the role of precision medicine, particularly targeted therapies, in impacting chronic disease. She reminds us that the role of early diagnosis is a key step in the healthcare journey. I found her thoughts about the role of artificial intelligence (AI) to be both realistic and pragmatic. She explains her leadership style and how the decision-making process is often different in Europe vs other areas of the world. And, like me, she believes that we are in a new renaissance when it comes to the future of health.
Elcin, welcome to Change Makers.
Elcin Barker Ergun: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here and a real pleasure.
Whyte: Here we are in Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance. Are we in a renaissance of clinical trials and research?
Barker Ergun: Absolutely. I think we’re really in an era of incredible change and progress. So many things have been happening, but now they’re all coming together as we go into precision medicine in a very, very determined way. It’s happening in academia and the whole ecosystem, both on the diagnostic side and on the therapeutic side. So, yes, it’s really a renaissance.
Whyte: I want to talk a little bit about your specific work and priorities. Before, we were talking about how here we are in Italy, the home of big cardiovascular trials, lipid-lowering agents, and novel anticoagulants. But you also have made a strong focus on oncology. Why is that?
Barker Ergun: In reality, we have not changed our focus on cardiovascular treatments. If we look at the world and mortality rates, cardiovascular diseases are still the number-one leading cause of death, John. We are the sixth biggest cardiovascular company in the world and we have every drug possible in that area. We will continue for the reason that there’s still a huge unmet need in that area. We all have to put a lot of effort into bringing more products and making sure that what we have available is used in the right way in hypertension control. So now let’s move into oncology. I joined Menarini as group CEO in September 2019. Even then, our owners had the vision to enter into oncology, so my coming was very much related to that. The biggest priority was to accelerate oncology and also turn our company’s direction to become more and more of an innovative pharma company.
Whyte: The big talk in cancer trials is really around precision medicine. When you think about precision medicine here at Menarini, what does that mean?
Barker Ergun: This is an area that I love talking about. It takes me back to that Renaissance question you asked about our industry at the moment. When you look at all the difficult-to-treat mutations or alterations, if you look at lung cancer, we have immune-oncology, but we now have drugs for ALK, Ros, and other things. When you look at acute myeloid leukemia, today we have Flt3 inhibitors, IDH inhibitors. And when you look at breast cancer, now we have, for example, our drug in ESR mutation. But in many different areas, we also have pathways now where we’re able to create drugs. So wherever you look, we are in that renaissance of targeting very difficult-to-treat mutations, and we’re truly now going for personalized treatment. In Menarini’s diagnostics division, one thing that our team is working on is to be able to bring for multiple myeloma (a hematologic area), instead of bone marrow biopsy, a blood test that can enable MRD [minimal residual disease]-negative monitoring with circulating tumor cells. Most of the applications today are ctDNA. But these circulating tumor cells, rare cells in the blood, can also inform us about the tumors in a complementary way.
Whyte: And that’s really exciting — to be able to find these markers in the blood rather than with bone marrow biopsy or lots of imaging studies.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/994284?src=soc_yt