AstraZeneca Offers a Perch to Cancer High Flier Who Stumbled

(Bloomberg) -- The second day into Jose Baselga’s tenure as head of AstraZeneca Plc’s cancer research, his new boss called him in to discuss a rival company’s drug.

Under development by Daiichi Sankyo Co., it represented the latest generation of treatments the researcher had tested earlier in his career. The drug could transform the way doctors look at one of the most common forms of breast cancer, Baselga told Astra Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot, who was already thinking about a deal.

“He looked at me and said, are you sure?” Baselga, 59, said in an interview in London. “I said yes. I had the advantage that I’d had hands-on experience with the drug.”

Baselga’s understanding of rivals’ pipelines and research upending the field of cancer treatments is why Astra hired a doctor who rose to become medical chief of New York’s most prestigious cancer center, only to be felled by controversy. Soriot hopes Baselga will help establish U.K.-based AstraZeneca as a leader in the $133 billion oncology market among rivals like Merck & Co., Pfizer Inc. and Roche Holding AG.

Since an outcry over industry ties forced his departure from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center last year, Baselga has changed lanes. In a corporate role he’s never held before, he’ll be responsible for bringing home Soriot’s biggest bets, including a March deal to pay as much as $6.9 billion for Daiichi’s drug.

Redefine the Field

In a nod to the experimental product’s magnitude, AstraZeneca just hired another breast cancer expert, the University of Calgary’s Sunil Verma. Baselga said he’s preparing to revolutionize the way the drug is tested -- and ultimately used -- focusing on tumors that make low levels of HER2, a cancer-driving protein that doctors began countering with Roche Holding AG’s Herceptin.

The Daiichi medication has shown effectiveness in patients who have stopped benefiting from multiple other therapies. It’s so precisely targeted that the number of people who could benefit from anti-HER2 therapy could increase by threefold, Baselga said, and Astra will test it on other tumors.

“Let’s redefine the field,” he said.

Soriot took a similarly disruptive approach to AstraZeneca’s structure when he brought Baselga on board. The CEO eliminated one of the company’s four drug development areas and combined others, leaving just two tracks -- cancer and everything else.

Frame Shift

The frame shift at Astra represents a level of attention Baselga has long demanded. When he became head of oncology at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona in 1996, colleagues said he wasn’t entitled to a seat on its scientific steering committee because of the unit’s low funding and productivity.

Baselga turned the tables. Raising private funds for new facilities, he spent more than a decade building a unit of six doctors into a division that now has more than 60 medical oncologists. Vall d’Hebron treats more than 5,000 new patients a year, many of them with experimental therapies.

Joan Comella, scientific director of Vall d’Hebron, often counseled friends to seek treatment from Baselga’s clinic, yet at times found himself wrangling with the cancer doctor over space and money.

“His character is very powerful, very dominant,” Comella said. “It’s not easy to negotiate with him, but at the same time he’s very fair.”

Early Decisions

Under Baselga, Vall d’Hebron became known for using gene sequencing to pinpoint patients whose tumors might respond to certain treatments. That way, doctors could determine early whether experimental therapies were worth testing in them.

“Now people come from all over Spain, all over Europe, for drugs that are in clinical trials here,” said Josep Tabernero, who succeeded Baselga at Vall d’Hebron.

His emphasis on early-stage testing fits with AstraZeneca’s efficiency drive. Almost one in five of AstraZeneca’s treatments make their way through clinical testing to the market, compared with an industry average of one in 20. That can save billions of dollars.

Since he arrived, Baselga has already cut six experimental treatments from Astra’s cancer pipeline, accelerating five others. “If the drug isn’t going to make it, you have to put it out of its misery,” he said.

Decoding DNA

During his five years as physician-in-chief at Memorial, Baselga helped create one of the first large hospital centers for decoding tumor DNA. The approach has helped identify treatments’ potential even earlier in development, and contributed to finding therapies for rare cancers.

However, the New York hospital proved to be the scene of Baselga’s undoing. An investigation by the New York Times and ProPublica found dozens of papers he authored or contributed to that lacked acknowledgment of funding from drug companies and other sources. While there were no accusations that the studies were skewed, Baselga had violated the rules of many scientific publications -- including Cancer Discovery, where he was an editor-in-chief.

“Everything he did would have been just fine if he had just taken the form seriously and disclosed” the payments, said Otis Brawley, former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

One of the reasons Baselga had received so much pharma money was that he had done so much testing work.

Christmas Call

“His skills are the ones desired by drug companies,” said Brawley, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Baselga took responsibility for the omissions, acknowledging that he “should have been more careful.” Still, he said his industry disclosures at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was head of oncology before going to Memorial, were “perfect.”

Baselga said he got a phone call just before Christmas from Soriot, whom he’d known for years, about the Astra job while at his country house in the Pyrenees. The hiring was announced a few weeks later.

“My goal will be to make this the best oncology development company in the world, and just push the limits of us being successful,” Baselga said. “I feel at home.”

To contact the reporter on this story: John Lauerman in London at jlauerman@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Eric Pfanner at epfanner1@bloomberg.net, Marthe Fourcade

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.