Abstract:

Everyone in cancer therapeutics is talking about personalized medicine - the matching of drugs to patients such that a drug is only used in patients with the right "kind" of tumor, susceptible to the inhibitory effects of the drug in question. Elegantly simple, turning this vision (and plentiful talk) into a drug development reality has been painfully slow. Despite the advances in cancer biology and multiple hypotheses concerning molecular markers of drug responses, nearly all "targeted" therapies are still developed in a blind fashion, in unselected general tumor populations, with an unsurprisingly high failure rate. Many molecular diagnostic companies are developing new technologies, but are unable to find drug development partners that want to use their offerings, and so revert to providing prognostic tools that can struggle to find clinical relevance.
 
Clovis Oncology is seeking to bring these two elements together in a coordinated fashion, aligning their own drug development programs and teams with several partner diagnostic companies and technologies, and using their combined expertise to deliver drug-diagnostic pairs to the marketplace. The talk will address the structural and logistical challenges that can impede drug-diagnostic co-development such as regulatory issues, tissue access, and partnership allocation of value and commercial rights, along with how these challenges can potentially be overcome.

Biography:

Dr. Allen is a co-founder of Clovis Oncology where he operates as Chief Medical Officer. Clovis Oncology was founded in 2009 with an initial raise of $146MM, has facilities in San Francisco, Boulder (CO), and Cambridge (UK), and was featured in the Fierce Biotech "Fierce 15 of 2009". Prior to Clovis, Dr Allen was in the same role at Pharmion, an Oncology therapeutics company focused on epigenetics that secured global approval of the first epigenetic cancer therapy - Vidaza for myelodysplastic syndromes. Pharmion was acquired by Celgene in 2008 for $2.9 billion. Before that, Dr Allen was VP Oncology drug development at Chiron (acquired by Novartis in 2006) and Global Project Head (Oncology) at Abbott Labs in Chicago where he worked closely with the molecular diagnostics team of the Abbott Diagnostics Division. Dr Allen also sits on the board of directors of Nodality, a molecular diagnostics company in South San Francisco. Dr Allen originally graduated in Medicine from Oxford, UK and was an academic nephrologist at Hammersmith Hospital, London, with a PhD in Immunology, then joining McKinsey and Co to work in life science strategy, leading into Oncology.