Iona Everson from PMGroup spoke to Jack Harris, Vice President of Oncology at GSK, about his career path and his drive to improve patient care

Iona Everson (IE): Over the course of your career, you’ve held roles across a variety of therapeutic areas. What led you to your current role as Vice President of Oncology at GSK?

Jack Harris (JH): I’ve been working in the pharma industry for 20 years and during that time I’ve worked for three different companies, all with a pretty consistent value structure and very much a patient-first mentality. I feel incredibly privileged to work in this industry and I’m proud of the impact it has on patients, healthcare providers and healthcare systems.

I started my career with MSD (known as Merck in the US) in a sales role, working in primary care therapy areas, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, focusing on how we communicate about our medicines and vaccines with our customers, and also how we get a better understanding of the day-to-day challenges of healthcare providers (HCPs) and what they really need from us as an industry, to better enable them to improve the lives of patients. I then moved into more of a marketing role and I also spent some time in business analytics.

Market research is a good way of understanding what customers need and how that translates into marketing strategy. I worked in a few different therapy areas, with a primary care focus, moving into more of a specialty area focused on infectious diseases, from antibiotics and antifungals to HIV and hepatitis C. Then I left MSD to move to Jansen.

Janssen is part of Johnson and Johnson (J&J), two companies that are both based in the US on the East Coast that are very consistent in terms of value structure. Whether it’s the George W Merck philosophy or the J&J credo, they very clearly put patients front and centre. I moved through various commercial roles at Janssen, from sales and marketing to market access in HIV and then into oncology. And that was my first real entry point into the oncology therapy area, covering both solid tumours and haematological malignancies.

During my time in Janssen, I also spent five years in an above country role as a product launch lead in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It was a fantastic role. Europe, the Middle East and Africa cover everything from established markets all the way through to emerging ones, with well-defined and established healthcare systems through to healthcare systems that are still very much in their infancy in terms of their provision for cancer care.

‘Bringing new cancer treatments to market is a very big passion of mine and being able to work in diverse regions really gave me an opportunity to develop’

I loved that role for many different reasons – bringing new cancer treatments to market is a very big passion of mine and being able to work in such diverse regions really gave me an opportunity to develop. I think it’s only when you start engaging with non-native English speakers, working with different cultures, different ways of working and different healthcare systems, that you really improve your communication style.

I then moved back to the UK with Jansen, where this opportunity at GSK came along. I was born and raised in Chiswick, just down the road from GSK’s head office in Brentford, so that office is one that I know well and I always hoped that GSK would be part of my career path at some point.

I’d spoken to a few people and I quickly realised that GSK, as an organisation, shares a lot of my own personal values and that’s a big driver for me. I want to work for a company that cares about very similar things that I do, that really focuses on being ambitious for patients and how we can drive improvements in patient outcomes. And how we can do that while also collaborating with external partners, healthcare providers and healthcare systems. Because I’m a big believer that no one company, no one person, can do this alone.

While GSK is well known in the pharmaceutical industry, I think even today it is still emerging as a player within the oncology space. When I joined GSK in November 2021 it was very much focused – and to a large extent still is – on gynaecological oncology, but it had this ambition to broaden its scope in the oncology space.

I felt I could bring my experience in launching new innovations in oncology to the table, so it seemed like a really good match, and I’m pleased to say that after two and a half years I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the move. We’ve come a long way from when I first joined – with one product within gynaecological oncology – to where we are now, with multiple products for multiple different types of cancers, significantly improving the lives of patients living with cancer in the UK.

IE: GSK currently focuses its research on oncology drug treatments. Beyond your current pipeline, what other new oncology indications are you looking at?
JH: The predominant focus at the moment is on gynaecological cancers and haematological malignancies. GSK is seen as a leader in gynaecological oncology based in the UK and we’re building on that footprint in haematological malignancies. We’re also looking at the types of assets and the science we want to follow in future research, whether we’re looking at immuno-oncology as a key area or at cell therapies.

Looking at the therapy areas where we have deep knowledge and expertise, along with the scientific innovations and capabilities that we can bring to the table, we have four medicines and six indications in the UK. We have a growing pipeline of 11 investigational treatments and we believe each of them will have the potential to make a meaningful difference to patients living with cancer in the UK and beyond over the next three years.

We’re aiming to deliver more than 20 product extensions and launches into the UK.  Certainly for GSK, that’s an unprecedented number of new UK entries and a very healthy position to be in, relative to the market. And we’re also looking to expand beyond our current areas within the next five years, as we look to focus on further cancer types such as lung cancer and colorectal cancer, and part of the reason that’s important for us is that both of these are high-prevalence cancers.

So we’re looking to increase our scale of impact on patients, on how we can improve their lives. We’re demonstrating a good track record and it’s not just around getting new products approved, it’s also about making sure that we can get them into the hands of patients. This year we’ve had one new marketing authorisation, we had one late last year and we’ve already had two NICE recommendations in the first quarter. So it’s brilliant that we’re able to develop new medicines and present that data to clinicians.  But a big part of our job is then working with the likes of NICE, NHS England and SMC to make sure that those products can get reimbursed and deliver the benefit to patients that they deserve.

IE: Are there any emerging treatment options in oncology that you think could have a lasting impact on patient care?
JH: Cancer is something that I think a lot of us have personal experience with and it’s something that really drives us. Certainly within the GSK UK oncology business, it’s difficult to find anyone who hasn’t been impacted in some way by cancer, whether directly or indirectly. And that very much fuels our passion to do more and to do better, not just for patients but also for everyone around them. That’s something that we often reference, that it’s not just patients’ lives that we’re improving, it’s also the lives of their family, their friends and their broader network. I have personal experience of that as well and it’s something that really makes us get out of bed in the morning, to make sure we do a better job than we did the day before.

What I’m most excited about in terms of future innovations and the direction of cancer care, whether that’s personalised care or precision medicine, is that we’re seeing some fantastic advancements in genetics. We’re gaining a better understanding of how genetics drives both disease and prognosis, and also how it can drive a more targeted approach to treatment.

Having that targeted, personalised approach is a great way to acknowledge that everyone is unique and everyone has individual needs. That’s one of the things we try to do at GSK – not just to make our treatments more personalised, but also how we can make our approach to getting those treatments to patients as personalised as possible.

Precision medicine and biomarkers are a critical part of our development strategy.  We’re looking at developing therapies that target specific biomarkers and genetic mutations, whether that’s within a particular cancer type or across multiple cancer types. And we’ve had some examples of that recently, of specific biomarkers that actually have prevalence across a number of different types of cancer.

‘Digital data and AI is going to be at the forefront of how we discover, develop and then commercialise our medicines and vaccines in the future’

Highlighting that very specific focus on the individual needs of patients and their disease, rather than looking at it in more of a traditional sense, we’ve had some really good experiences over the last 12-18 months where we can definitively show that we can better improve patient outcomes if we’re able to focus on these specific biomarkers and these specific genetic mutations. It also enables HCPs to have better, more informed discussions with their patients around the prognosis of their disease and the specific treatment options that are available to them based on the specificity of their disease.

But that doesn’t just happen through science, it also needs to happen through collaboration.

One of the things we’ve been working on with the NHS and other healthcare providers is how we can ensure that patients get the appropriate genetic tests, as it’s not just around the detection of their cancer, it’s also around what form of genetic testing they’re going through at that point of diagnosis and how we get that done as quickly as possible, while also making sure that patients are appropriately counselled when they receive that information – the patient themselves or their broader family members – in terms of what that might mean for their extended family.

Again, it comes back to collaboration. So while we’ve been working with various stakeholders within the NHS, we’re also working with patient advocacy groups to ensure that, when they’re communicating to patients, they’re able to talk about that ability to personalise treatment, whether on genetics or specific biomarkers or individual needs for that patient or their carer. Oncology care is such a huge area – there are different sectors and each sector needs to be addressed with the same kind of care, attention and expertise – it’s not just about diagnosing the disease. Patient care and patient advocacy groups are so important and I think that is particularly true today, for two reasons: the diversity of patients and the individuality of their lives.

Focusing on diversity, we’ve been doing a lot of work with a few groups in ovarian cancer looking on how we can better articulate the needs of individual patients across a broad spectrum of diversity. It’s clear that the one-size-fits-all approach really doesn’t work and that we need to better tailor patient care.

The other aspect involves everything else that’s going on in patients’ lives and we’ve been working with a few groups to help us better understand and support patients.  There are patients who are struggling to pay for a bus or a train to get to their follow-up appointments, patients who have to make a choice between getting the care they need versus being able to buy food for their family. So increasingly, we’re looking at the use of digital technologies, how we can use remote monitoring and digital data to best support patients. Remote care has really grown, especially due to the pandemic, which was such a catalyst for so many things and led to an increase in productivity and the ability to enable patients to get that home care.

We want to make sure that patients get the best treatment but we also need to look at it within a wider context. I’m a big believer that, as an industry, we have a responsibility to do more than just provide medicines for treatment – we’ve got to do better than that.

IE: With technology advancing at a rapid rate in recent years, particularly with AI, how is GSK utilising new technologies to advance its oncology research and patient care?
JH: Digital data and AI has exploded and clearly there are things that we need to consider and risks that we need to mitigate. But I think this is going to be at the forefront of how we discover, develop and then commercialise our medicines and vaccines in the future.

At GSK we put technology at the very centre of what we do. Uniting science, technology and talent is very much part of our ethos and mission. So we’re putting technology firmly at the centre of our strategic decision-making, across all facets of our business, and AI is a big part of that. We are actively exploring the use of AI across all areas of our business, whether that’s in drug design, clinical trials, patient care. And we’re hoping, if not expecting, that the use of AI will accelerate the development of innovative medicines and we’re hoping that technology will enable us to not only gain a better insight but also provide a better experience for patients.

Iona Everson is Group Managing Editor of PMGroup