Ovarian CanceRx: New Approaches to Accelerating Biomedical Innovation

An invitation-only workshop jointly organized by the University of Southern California (USC), the Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator at Harvard Business School, and the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE) with the participation of the American Cancer Society.

Organizing Committee: Cary Frydman, USC Marshall; Kathy Giusti, HBS Kraft; Richard Hamermesh, HBS Kraft; Gerald Hoberg, USC Marshall; Suh-Pyng Ku, USC Marshall; Andrew Lo, MIT LFE; Rodney Ramcharan, USC Marshall; Lynda Roman, USC Keck

Date: June 10, 2019

Location: Jill and Frank Fertitta Hall, Marshall Business School, University of Southern California 
610 Childs Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089

With a five-year relative survival rate of less than 50%, ovarian cancer is one of the most lethal gynecologic malignancies worldwide and ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women. Yet relative to breast cancer, lung cancer, and melanoma, progress has been considerably slower in the development of new treatments for ovarian cancer over the past decade. By convening a group of key stakeholders and thought leaders, our goal is to develop a comprehensive and actionable plan for accelerating the pace of innovation to address this unmet medical need.

With a particular focus on novel business models and financial vehicles for raising and deploying funds for early-stage biomedical research and drug development in a scalable and profitable manner, one of the key challenges we aim to address is the risk and uncertainty that comes with early-stage and translational medicine. Although we are seeing incredible scientific advancements on a near-daily basis, we are also seeing increased risk and complexity as a result of these breakthroughs. This inevitably leads to an outflow of capital for the riskiest—and potentially most transformative—R&D efforts as investors and other stakeholders seek other more attractive opportunities.

This meeting brought together a small group of key stakeholders and thought leaders from academic medical centers and university research laboratories, financial institutions, pharma and biotech, government, non-profits, and patient advocates to explore ways to reduce the risk and uncertainty. Participants engaged in active dialogue regarding specific funding needs, potential new business and legal structures, and new sources of capital to fund such enterprises. Organized as a series of panel discussions with substantial audience participation, topics included:

• Opportunities and challenges in ovarian cancer therapeutic development
• Clinical trial design and implications for commercialization
• The role of big data, analytics, and artificial intelligence
• New business and financing models, and investor perspectives

Organizing Staff: Jayna Cummings, LFE; Terry Lichvar, USC Marshall; Crystal Myler, LFE

• David Agus, M.D., University of Southern California
• Anna Barker, Ph.D., Arizona State University
• Amy Cohen Epstein, Lynne Cohen Foundation
• Dana Goldman, Ph.D., University of Southern California
• Jennifer Friel Goldstein, M.B., M.B.A., Silicon Valley Bank
• Peter Hancock 
• Beth Karlan, M.D., UCLA
• Sean Khozin, M.D., M.P.H., FDA Oncology Center of Excellence
• Jerry Lee, Ph.D., University of Southern California
• J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, M.D., M.A.C.P., American Cancer Society
• Yvonne Lin, M.D. Medical Director, Genentech
• Laurel Rice, M.D., University of Wisconsin,  American Gynecologic & Obstetrical Society
• Richard Roll, Ph.D., Caltech
• Anil Sood, M.D., MD Anderson Cancer Center

Monday, June 10, 2019
8:00am—8:00pm
Jill and Frank Fertitta Hall
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California
610 Childs Way
Los Angeles, CA 90089
(map)

Agenda

Download the PDF HERE

Required Pre-Conference Reading

Making Faster Progress in Ovarian Cancer: New Research Directions an Business Models

Additional Readings

To make the most of our time together, we’ve compiled a short list of readings you may find helpful in preparing for discussions.

• A mathematical-descriptor of tumor-mesoscopicstructure from computed-tomography images annotates prognostic- and molecular-phenotypes of epithelial ovarian cancer, Haonan Lu et al. 2019, Nature Communications 10. 
• A portfolio approach to accelerate therapeutic innovation in ovarian cancer, Shomesh Chaudhuri et al. 2019 Journal of Investment Management 17, pp. 1-12. 
• Disparities in the allocation of research funding to gynecologic cancers by Funding to Lethality scores, Ryan Spencer et al. 2019 Gynecologic Oncology 152, pp 106-111.
• Epithelial ovarian cancer,  Stephanie Lheureux et al. 2019 Lancet 393 pp.1240–53
• Financing translation: Analysis of the NCATS rare-diseases portfolio, David E. Fagnan et al. 2015 Science Translational Medicine 7 pp. 276-276ps3. 
• Impact Investing Could Accelerate the Fight Against Cancer, Richard G. Hamermesh and Kathy Giusti. 2018 Harvard Business Review.
• Kathy Giusti and the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, Richard G. Hamermesh et al. 2014 Harvard Business School.
• Ovarian cancer, Ursula A. Matulonis et al. 2016 Nature Reviews Disease Primers v2. 
• Ovarian cancers: evolving paradigms in research and care Report in Brief and Recommendations, National Academy of Sciences 2016.
• Re-inventing drug development: A case study of the I-SPY 2 breast cancer clinical trials program, Sonya Das and Andrew W. Lo 2017, Contemporary Clinical Trials 62 pp. 168-174. 
• Venture Philanthropy: A Case Study of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Esther S. Kim and Andrew W. Lo 2019 SSRN. 

David Agus
Steering Committee, Speaker

David B. Agus is a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and Viterbi School of Engineering. He is the founding director and CEO of the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC.  A medical oncologist, Agus leads a multidisciplinary team of researchers dedicated to the development and use of technologies to guide doctors in making health-care decisions tailored to individual needs.  An international leader in new technologies and approaches for personalized healthcare, Agus serves in leadership roles at the World Economic Forum and other prestigious organizations. He is also a CBS News contributor. Agus’ three books “The End of Illness”, “A Short Guide to a Long Life” and “The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health” are all New York Times and international bestsellers.

Anna Barker
Steering Committee, Panelist

As co-director of CAS-Biomedicine, Dr. Anna Barker designs and implements new research knowledge networks, projects and models to address major problems in biomedical research and biomedicine. Prior to ASU, she served as the Deputy Director and Deputy Director for Strategic Scientific Initiatives for the National Cancer Institute (NCI)/National Institutes of Health (NIH). She was founding co-chair of the NCI-FDA Interagency Task Force (IOTF), founding co-chair of the Cancer Steering Committee of the FNIH Biomarkers Consortium (FNIH-BC), and was responsible for the NCI’s international cancer research programs. Barker was a senior executive at Battelle Memorial Institute for 18 years and was also co-founder and CEO of a public biotechnology company focused on novel strategies to control reactive oxygen damage in inflammatory diseases and cancer. She serves on a number of boards of for profit and non-profit organizations, as chair of national committees and in strategic advisory roles. Barker received her M.A. and Ph.D. at the Ohio State University, where she trained in immunology and microbiology.

John Carpten
Panelist

Dr. John Carpten currently serves as Professor and Chair for the Department of Translational Genomics, and Director of the Institute for Translational Genomics, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.  Previously he was Professor and Deputy Director of Basic Sciences, Translational Genomics Research Institute, Phoenix, AZ. Carpten’s research background spans a very broad range of topics including work in germline genetics, tumor genome analysis, cancer cell biology, and health disparities. Moreover, Dr. Carpten has an intense focus on understanding the role of biology in disparate cancer incidence and mortality rates seem among underrepresented populations.

Carpten has served on and chaired several NIH study sections, and is currently a permanent member of the NCI Board of Scientific Counselors.  He also sits on one of the NIH Director’s Special Advisory committees.  Moreover, he co-chaired the AACR inaugural Special Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities, and will serve as Program Committee Chairperson for the AACR 2019 Annual meeting in Atlanta, GA.

Shomesh Chaudhuri
Panelist

Shomesh E. Chaudhuri is a postdoctoral associate in the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering where he helps design new funding vehicles and business models to access previously untapped pools of capital to support biomedical innovation. He has published articles in top finance and biotech journals including JAMA Oncology, Drug Discovery Today, and Management Science. His general research interests include simulating the financial performance of securitized biomedical research, designing clinical trials using Bayesian decision analysis, and building machine learning models for predicting drug approvals.

Chaudhuri received a B.S. in biomedical engineering from Harvard University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.

Amy Cohen Epstein
Steering Committee, Panelist

Amy Cohen Epstein is the President and Executive Director of the Lynne Cohen Foundation. Established in 1998 in memory of Cohen Epstein’s mother, the Foundation combats women’s cancers through education, preventive care and collaborative medicine.

The Lynne Cohen Foundation has established preventive care clinics throughout the country. In each of these clinics, at risk women see a team of doctors who then collaborate to determine the best course of action for their patient. In one such clinic, the Lynne Cohen Foundation furthers the reach of this collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to medicine by making it available to women of all financial backgrounds.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Cohen Epstein has also lived all over the world. After graduating from Duke University and founding the Lynne Cohen Foundation in 1998, she lived in New York, Washington DC and then Abu Dhabi, UAE before returning to Los Angeles. Cohen Epstein currently lives with her husband, Matthew Epstein, and their three boys in Santa Monica, CA.

Cary Frydman
Organizing Committee

Cary Frydman is an associate professor of finance and business economics at the USC Marshall School of Business. His research is in the areas of experimental economics and behavioral finance, with an emphasis on studying the psychology of investor behavior. He uses a variety of data sources to understand why investors exhibit trading biases, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, and trading decisions from brokerage databases. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Review of Finance.

Frydman holds a Ph.D. in economics from the California Institute of Technology and a B.A. in economics and mathematics from Northwestern University.

Kathy Giusti
Organizing Committee

Kathy Giusti, a multiple myeloma patient, is the Founder and Chief Mission Officer of the MMRF.  She is Faculty Co-Chair of the HBS-Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator. Guisti’s leadership in precision medicine, data sharing, and patient engagement have earned her numerous awards and recognitions. Most recently, she was named 1 of 3 Business Leaders Disrupting Medicine and one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune magazine. Giusti’s efforts have been featured on CNN, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News and in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and WIRED. She serves on the advisory boards of Verily and Project Baseline, and is member of the HBS Health Advisory Board and FasterCures’ Non-Profit Council.

Michael Goldberg
Panelist

Dr. Michael Goldberg is CEO of STIMIT. Previously, he was an assistant professor of Cancer Immunology & Virology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. He graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Hon. B.Sc. in Biological Chemistry from the University of Toronto and received an M.Phil. in BioScience Enterprise from the University of Cambridge. Goldberg completed his Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the mentorship of Bob Langer and his post-doctoral training in the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT under the mentorship of Phil Sharp. Goldberg’s research – which has focused on drug delivery, synthetic lethality, and cancer immunotherapy – has been published in Cell, Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology, and Science Translational Medicine.

Dana Goldman
Steering Committee, Panelist

Dana Goldman is the Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair and Distinguished Professor of Pharmacy, Public Policy, and Economics at the University of Southern California.  He is also a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and research associate with the National Bureau for Economic Research.

Goldman has served as a health policy advisor to the Congressional Budget Office, Covered California, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute.  He is a founding editor of the Forum for Health Economics and Policy and serves on several editorial boards including Health Affairs and the American Journal of Managed Care. He is also an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Goldman advises many companies in the life sciences industry.  He was a co-founder of Precision Health Economics in 2006 and currently serves as a scientific advisor to the firm.  Prior to arriving at USC, he spent 15 years at the RAND Corporation.

Goldman received his B.A. summa cum laude from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

Jennifer Friel Goldstein
Steering Committee, Panelist

Jennifer Friel Goldstein, BSE/MB/MBA, is a managing director and senior market manager of Silicon Valley Bank’s Life Science and Healthcare practice.

Goldstein is responsible for Healthcare across all sectors on the West Coast and serves as the Head of our Biotechnology and Diagnostics Practice. She joined SVB after a successful tenure at Pfizer, where she served as a Director on Pfizer’s Venture Capital team. Before that, while a consultant at Bain & Company in London, Goldstein focused on private equity deals across Europe. She brings over 15 years of investing, banking, business development, portfolio management, and strategy experience as well as a biotechnology background to the team.

Goldstein graduated magna cum laude with a BSE in Bioengineering and a Master’s of Biotechnology from the University of Pennsylvania. Jennifer was also named a Joseph Wharton Fellow while completing her MBA at the Wharton School.

In her free time, Jennifer enjoys remaining involved with SpringBoard Enterprises, serving on the board of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in Silicon Valley, and spending time with her husband and their twin children who keep them on their toes!

Julie Grant
Panelist

Julie Grant is a Partner at Canaan Partners, a tech and healthcare venture capital fund with $5B assets under management. She leads investments and company formation efforts in biopharma and digital health companies that tangibly improve patient care.  Since joining Canaan in 2013, Grant has incubated, financed, and supported investments in multiple new biopharmaceutical companies including Nocion, Protagonist (PTGX), Cellular Research, Dermira, Labrys Biologics, CytomX, Unchained Labs, Chrono Therapeutics, Genome Medical, Glooko, Vineti and Truveris.

Richard Hamermesh
Organizing Committee

Richard Hamermesh is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Business School, where he was formerly the MBA Class of 1961 Professor of Management Practice. Currently, he is the Faculty Co-Chair of the Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator. From 1987 to 2001, Hamermesh was a Co-Founder and a Managing Partner of the Center for Executive Development, an executive education and development consulting firm. Prior to this, he was a member of the faculty of the Harvard Business School.

Hamermesh is also an active investor and entrepreneur, having participated as a principal, director and investor in the founding and early stages of more than 20 organizations. He was the founding president of the Newton Schools Foundation and served on the editorial board of the Harvard Business Review.

He is the author or co-author of five books, including New Business Ventures and The Entrepreneur. His best-known book, Fad-Free Management, was published in 1996.

Beth Karlan
Steering Committee, Panelist

Dr. Beth Y. Karlan, M.D. is Professor and Vice Chair of Women’s Health Research in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She is also Director of Cancer Population Genetics at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA. Karlan’s research focuses on ovarian and other women’s cancers as well as inherited cancer susceptibility. She has authored over 350 research publications and is an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor. She is Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journals Gynecologic Oncology and Gynecologic Oncology Reports. In 2012, Karlan was appointed by the White House to serve on the National Cancer Advisory Board and in 2015 she was elected to membership in the National Academy of Medicine. Karlan is a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Sean Khozin
Steering Committee, Panelist

Dr. Sean Khozin, MD, MPH is a physician-data scientist focusing on building solutions at the intersection of biomedicine, healthcare, and connected technologies. A thoracic oncologist, Dr. Khozin currently serves as Associate Director at FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence Khozin is Founding Director of Information Exchange and Data Transformation (INFORMED), FDA’s first data science and technology incubator for collaborative regulatory science research driving innovations that enhance the agency’s mission of promotion and protection of public’s health. The research portfolio of INFORMED includes investigations related to decentralized clinical trials as means of modernizing clinical evidence generation, examination of the utility of biosensors and the internet of things to quantify intrinsic and extrinsic (e.g., environmental) factors influencing the patient’s experience, development of new applications for machine learning and artificial intelligence in regulatory science and drug development, and testing the utility of decentralized technologies such as blockchain to enable secure exchange of health data at scale.

Previously, Khozin was Founder and Chief Medical Officer of a multidisciplinary healthcare delivery network as a practicing physician and Cofounder of a health technology company specializing in building integrated and interoperable systems with telemedicine, point-of-care data visualization, and advanced analytics capabilities.

Suh-Pyng Ku
Organizing Committee, Speaker

Suh-Pyng Ku is a Professor of Clinical Finance & Business Economics at USC Marshall School of Business. Her teaching and research specialties include corporate finance, portfolio management, and security valuation. She teaches corporate finance and applied investment management courses in the MBA program. In addition, she serves as the Vice Dean for Graduate Programs and Director of the USC Marshall Center for Investment Studies. Previously, Ku served as USC’s vice provost and executive director of continuing education and summer programs. Prior to that, she served as USC’s chief technology officer for enhanced learning, Associate Dean for Marshall MBA Program and Marshall’s chief information officer. She is the 2014 Golden Apple Teaching Award Winner for the Full-Time MBA Core Program and a 2014 Steven B. Sample Teaching and Mentoring Award Nominee, USC Office for Parent Programs. Ku received her Ph.D. degree in Finance from USC.

Neil Kumar
Speaker

Neil Kumar, Ph.D., is the CEO and Founder of BridgeBio Pharma, LLC, a company focused on the development of novel therapies for rare genetic disorders. Prior to that, he was a principal at Third Rock

Ventures where he supported and managed various portfolio companies in addition to focusing on new company formation and due diligence. He also held the role of Vice President, Business Development and Operations for MyoKardia. Prior to joining Third Rock, Kumar was an associate principal at

McKinsey & Company, where he developed strategies for pharmaceutical and medical device companies and helped lead McKinsey’s personalized medicine efforts. Before joining McKinsey, Kumar was involved in the formation of a gene chip startup and was a technical consultant for AstraZeneca’s pathway signaling group.  Kumar is the author of several peer-reviewed papers in the fields of oncology and systems biology.

Kumar holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering from Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jerry Lee
Steering Committee, Speaker

Jerry S.H. Lee, PhD is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine and Chemical Engineering & Material Sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and Viterbi School of Engineering. He also serves as the Chief Science and Innovation Officer for the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC.  Prior to joining USC, Lee served for more than a decade as a Health Sciences Director within the National Cancer Institute’s Office of the Director. In 2016, Lee was assigned to Office of the Vice President to serve as the Director for Cancer Research and Technology for the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force. Lee’s research involves elucidating the interplay between biophysical and biochemical drivers of age-related diseases.  He is a member of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Research Advisory Council, the National Academies Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy’s Innovation Policy Forum, and the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute’s Board of Trustees.

Lee earned his B.S. degree in biomedical engineering and Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Leonard Lichtenfeld
Steering Committee

Leonard Lichtenfeld is the interim Chief Medical and Scientific Officer for the American Cancer Society. He joined the Society in 2001 as a medical editor, and in 2002 assumed responsibility for managing the Society’s newly created Cancer Control Science Department. In 2014, Lichtenfeld entered his current role as Deputy Chief Medical Officer where he has provided extensive support to a number of Society activities. He is board certified in medical oncology and internal medicine and practiced for over 19 years.

Lichtenfeld is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann Medical College (now Drexel University College of Medicine) in Philadelphia and completed his postgraduate training at Temple University Hospital, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute. He is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the national honor medical society and has received several awards including designation as a Master in the American College of Physicians in recognition of his professional accomplishments.  Lichtenfeld currently resides with his wife in Atlanta, GA.

Yvonne Lin
Steering Committee, Panelist

Yvonne Lin, MD, MS is a board-certified gynecologic oncologist and also a Medical Director in product development at Genentech Roche. She leads the global phase 3 trial evaluating cancer immunotherapy in ovarian cancer patients and also co-led the development of the integrated ovarian cancer strategy at Roche. Prior to joining industry, Lin was a physician-scientist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine and a clinical trialist with the GOG. She maintains her clinical acumen by providing 2^nd opinions at UCSF. She is also a volunteer attending at USC+LAC. She has degrees from MIT, Harvard, UC Irvine, and did her OB/GYN- and Gyn Onc training at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School and at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, respectively.

Andrew Lo
Organizing Committee, Speaker

Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Lo’s current research spans five areas: evolutionary models of investor behavior and adaptive markets, systemic risk and financial regulation, quantitative models of financial markets, financial applications of machine-learning techniques and secure multi-party computation, and healthcare finance.

Lo received a B.A. in economics from Yale University in 1980 and an A.M. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1984. From 1984 to 1988, he was an assistant and associate professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He has been at MIT since 1988.

Parag Mallick
Speaker

Dr. Parag Mallick is an Associate Professor at Stanford University. Originally trained as an engineer and biochemist, his research spans computational and experimental systems biology, cancer biology and nanotechnology. Mallick received his Ph.D. from UCLA, where he worked with Dr. David Eisenberg. He completed Post-Doctoral studies at The Institute for Systems Biology, in Seattle, WA with Dr. Ruedi Aebersold. Beyond studying fundamental disease mechanisms, his group has been pioneering big-data approaches for enabling personalized and predictive medicine. In addition to his academic training, Mallick is also an accomplished magician. Mallick is a member, and frequent performer at the prestigious Magic Castle in Hollywood. He has performed all over the world for clients ranging from A-List Celebrities to Fortune 500 companies.

Larry Norton
Speaker

Dr. Larry Norton, M.D., Norna S. Sarofim Chair of Clinical Oncology and Senior Vice President, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Medical Director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center is Professor of Medicine, Weill-Cornell Medical College. He is a founder of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and has served as its Scientific Director since the Foundation’s inception in 1993. Norton has served on or chaired numerous committees of the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and has served as President of the American Society of Clinical Oncology among other leadership roles in that and other organizations. He is also a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and of the American Association for Cancer Research Academy.

Norton co-invented the Norton-Simon Model of cancer growth which has broadly influenced cancer therapy, and more recently the self-seeding concept of cancer metastasis and growth. He is the Principal Investigator of an NCI Program Project Grant in Models of Human Breast Cancer.

Amanda Paulovich
Panelist

Dr. Amanda Paulovich received her M.D. and Ph.D. (in Genetics, working with Nobel Laureate Dr. Leland Hartwell) at the University of Washington. She completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and a fellowship in Oncology at Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Center in Boston.  Her postdoctoral training was done at MIT-Whitehead Center for Genomics Research working with Dr. Eric Lander. Over the past 15 years, Paulovich’s research has focused on relieving a roadblock in biomedical research: a lack of validated and standardized tools for quantifying human proteins. Her laboratory has been a major developer of targeted, multiple reaction monitoring mass spectrometry (MRM)-based proteomic assays, which are highly precise, specific, multiplexable, and harmonizable across laboratories.  Paulovich’s well established team is now pivoting from technology development to turning this technology into transformative tools that will fundamentally change biomedical research and lead to improvements in patient diagnosis and treatment by facilitating precision oncology. She was inducted to American Society for Clinical Investigation, was awarded the Aven Foundation Endowed Chair in 2018, and was appointed Director of the Clinical Research Proteomics Platform of the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine in 2019.

Sulekha Ramayya
Panelist

Sulekha Ramayya is an investor on KKR’s Health Care industry team, where she invests across the Buyout, Growth, and Royalties strategies. She serves as a Board Observer of BrightSpring Health Services and Ebb Therapeutics. Prior to joining KKR, she worked at Goldman Sachs in NYC, where she was involved in a number of M&A and financing transactions in the healthcare space.

She received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California, graduating University Valedictorian, Class Speaker, summa cum laude, and Tau Beta Pi.

Rodney Ramcharan
Organizing Committee

Rodney Ramcharan is Associate Professor of Finance and Business Economics in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Previously, he worked at the Board Governors of the Federal Reserve System, serving as the first chief of the Systemic Financial Institutions and Markets Section (2012-2015). In that role, Ramcharan helped develop analyses to understand better the role of financial institutions in the US economy, and contributed to the regulatory policy discussions at both the Federal Reserve and at Basel. He also worked for the International Monetary Fund from 2000-2010 during which he contributed to policy discussions on exchange rates and monetary policy in emerging markets such as South Africa and in a number of developing economies. He also served on the editorial board of Finance and Development and have been a visiting scholar at the Dutch National Bank, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and served as a consultant to the Swedish Riksbank.

Laurel Rice
Steering Committee

Dr. Laurel W. Rice is Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and a Professor in the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

Rice attended college and medical school at the University of Colorado. She completed her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology as well as a Fellowship in Gynecologic Oncology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. After four years on the faculty of Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Virginia (UVA) recruited her to the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Rice is President of the American Gynecological & Obstetrical Society, Past President of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology, Past President of the Council of University Chairs of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and an active member of several other professional organizations. Since 2006, Rice has served on the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and currently serves as a Representative on the Board of Directors. Additionally, she is currently serving a four-year term as Treasurer. She is also an examiner for candidates seeking board certification in both General Obstetrics and Gynecology, in addition to the subspecialty area of Gynecologic Oncology.

Lynda Roman
Organizing Committee, Speaker

Dr. Lynda Roman is a recognized expert in gynecologic oncology. She completed her fellowship in gynecologic oncology at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas in 1991.

Presently, she serves as Director of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, as well as the fellowship program director.  Also Roman is the co-director of the Lynne Cohen Preventive Cancer Care Clinic at the USC/Norris Cancer Center. She serves as a topic specialist for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and has authored or co-authored over 130 peer-reviewed publications focusing on gynecologic cancers.  She has had a longstanding focus on the medical and surgical management of ovarian cancer.

Anil Sood
Steering Committee, Panelist

Dr. Anil K. Sood is Professor and Vice Chair for Translational Research in the Department of Gynecologic Oncology and Reproductive Medicine at the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. He holds a joint appointment in Cancer Biology and is co-director of the Center for RNA Interference and Non-Coding RNA at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. He is also Director of the multi-disciplinary Blanton-Davis Ovarian Cancer Research Program and co-leads the Ovarian Cancer Moonshot Program.

Sood received his medical degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A major and consistent theme of his scientific research has been on understanding human cancer biology and converting lab discoveries into novel therapeutics. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Association of American Physicians (AAP). Sood was selected as an American Cancer Society Research Professor in 2017.

Ryan Spencer
Panelist

Dr. Ryan Spencer received his medical degree from the Stony Brook University School of Medicine in 2007 and earned the Szema Yuan-Pian Award for the highest academic rank in the graduating class. He completed his residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Harvard integrated training program at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in 2012. In 2015, he finished a Gynecologic Oncology fellowship at the University of Wisconsin where he continues his practice. In 2018, he completed a Master’s of Science in Clinical Investigation.

Spencer has numerous presentations and publications related to improving the quality of life for cancer survivors, improving quality and access to care, and investigating funding disparities for gynecologic malignancies. He continues to volunteer time on a national level to improve health care policy surrounding funding for gynecologic cancer research.