From left: Katie Thiede of Bright Pink, Jill O’Donnell-Tormey of Cancer Research Institute, and Martin Murphy of CEO Roundtable on Cancer
Nonprofits have a special authority, the power to bring people together, and it’s that ability that makes these organizations important in the fight against cancer.
“Not for profits are very willing to collaborate,” said Jill O’Donnell-Tormey, CEO and director of scientific affairs of the New York-based Cancer Research Institute, during a discussion at the MedCity CONVERGE Conference in Philadelphia this week.
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That convening power was one of the takeaways from a longer discussion about how nonprofits organize education campaigns, encourage clinical trials, and share data, all in the name of supporting researchers, hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry as they work to improve cancer treatment.
O’Donnell-Tormey was joined by Martin Murphy, CEO of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, which brings together leaders from academia, business, and government to collaborate on cancer trials and treatment, as well as Katie Thiede, CEO of Chicago-based Bright Pink, which is focused on the prevention and early detection of breast and ovarian cancer. Her point about collaboration and partnership was echoed by Murphy.
“Do any of us have any authority? God no. But we can bring the right people into the room who have the authority and responsibility in their own domains,” Murphy said. “And if you extend an invitation to dialogue, it lowers barriers to allow conversations to happen.”
Murphy shared a story about a meeting the CEO Roundtable organized for several CEOs from big pharmaceutical companies. Because the nonprofit set up the meeting, it could act as a buffer during the discussion, able to pose questions, for instance, about why sharing clinical data is important — and it posed those questions in a way that the pharmaceutical companies didn’t see as an injunction to give up their intellectual property. By the end of the meeting, Murphy said the companies were talking about how they could do a better job of sharing data from clinical cancer trials while protecting each individual company’s IP.
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Of course, setting up meetings isn’t all that nonprofits do when it comes to cancer treatment and prevention. The Cancer Research Institute currently has a partnership with the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco. Through the Tesla partnership — with no relationship to the Elon Musk-run car company — the two institutes are able to work with about 40 nonprofit labs and companies on neoantigen research.
Bright Pink’s Thiede put the spotlight on how nonprofits are able to boost cancer prevention through awareness. The Chicago nonprofit uses a suite of digital tools specifically tailored for younger women. Its “Assess Your Risk” tool is a 19-question survey that asks women about their lifestyles, personal health information, and family health history to help them determine whether they’re at risk for breast or ovarian cancer. Having these questions come from a nonprofit, Thiede said, almost seems to lower the stakes — the test doesn’t seem as intimidating as it might have been had it come from a hospital or medical provider. As a result, women are willing to fill out the survey, and 600,000 have completed an “Assess Your Risk” questionnaire to date, she said.
But Thiede also made the connection to the talk’s overarching theme of collaboration and nonprofits’ ability to bring groups together. She talked about how Bright Pink works with Chicago’s Outcome Health, which distributes content on tablets in doctor’s offices. Some of that content comes from Bright Pink, and now some 400,000 women have read articles about breast and ovarian cancer.
“Partnerships make us successful in expanding our reach,” she said.
Photo: Andrew Zaleski
