Transforming Patient-Centric Cancer Care

Sunil Verma, MD, of AstraZeneca envisions the future of cancer care, including the role of AI and streamlining screening guidelines.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] JOHN WHYTE Facing a cancer diagnosis is something no one wants to experience even with all the remarkable advances in treatment. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Sunil Verma, AstraZeneca's Senior Vice President and global head of the oncology franchise, who's at the forefront of transforming cancer care. Dr. Verma is not only driving the development of more personalized treatments but also championing the importance of early detection.
We recently sat down and discussed his vision for the future of cancer care, including the role of artificial intelligence, the need to clarify often confusing screening guidelines, and how exactly we enhance the patient experience. If cancer has touched your life, you will want to watch this conversation. Dr. Verma, thanks for joining me.
SUNIL VERMA It's great to be here, John. Thank you.
JOHN WHYTE Well, let's start off and get right at it because you talk about the need to transform oncology care. So if we need to transform it, what do we need to change that we're currently doing?
SUNIL VERMA So there are some important elements that we have to consider as we think about what are those challenges. So one is the complexity of care. When we think about the options patients have, clinicians have, even 5, 10 years ago, we really had chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, and targeted treatments. Then, of course, came immune therapy, which has really helped many patients.
But thinking about the next 10, 15, 20 years with antibody drug conjugates, cell therapies, radio conjugates, the complexity of care is going to be substantially more complex. And I think we need to make sure that we are partnering effectively to simplify care and not make it more complex. So an important element of how we think about partnership, how we think about the future state, is how do we make sure that we simplify the care decision making so that patients are able to access the right therapy at the right time in a more meaningful manner.
JOHN WHYTE I mentioned to you before we went on that I follow you on LinkedIn and like your profile. You talk a lot on LinkedIn about the need for these partnerships. Who do we need to be partnering with? Is it the patient community? Is it regulators? And they don't think of partnership in the same way. Where are those partnerships in your mind that we need to be more focused on?
SUNIL VERMA As a clinician and thinking and delivering about cancer care and through my academic and clinical care, you tend to be very focused right on the patient in front of you. How do we bring the right therapies and the best therapies to that patient? But I think being in industry and being in pharmaceutical companies over the last few years, it has really given me an appreciation that the health ecosystem is very broad, and the partners who are part of that ecosystem need to be much better integrated.
And these partnerships include from diagnostic companies to make sure we have the right biomarker information, from data companies who are able to assimilate information and provide information to the clinicians, to the health systems, and maybe the patients in the future. We have to think about the health tech companies who are also involved in thinking about how do we make sure that the patients have the right information on their hands.
But we are collecting the right information from patients to make the clinical journey much better, much smoother. We're thinking about also how do we leverage the new emerging technologies, such as AI, into the mix and also the education companies-- of how do we make sure the information is disseminated to the clinicians and to patients along the way. So that whole health ecosystem requires partnerships.
JOHN WHYTE We can't talk about transforming oncology care and not talk specifically about AI. So you've mentioned it a couple of times. And I'd want to know where you kind of sit on that continuum where there are some folks that are saying, "You know what? We haven't even scratched the surface of the power of AI."
And there's others that will say, "You know what? It's never going to replace a physician and make that cancer diagnosis." And there's others over here that will say, "Everyone should have a second opinion that's generated by AI." So where does Dr. Verma stand on the role of AI in transforming cancer care?
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