I’ve been watching the Olympics this past week, especially the US women’s Olympic basketball team. As I was watching, I started thinking about a comment that a colleague once made about my work with trastuzumab.
What I want to discuss next about the link between these two items may differ from what you think. It has nothing to do with whether the US Olympic team succeeds at the Paris Olympics. Nor is it about the work my group and many others did at Genentech to develop, manufacture, and launch trastuzumab.
The connection became clear to me when I started reading about the WNBA’s history and the challenges of integrating new players, especially when they bring something new to the team if they offer something new.
At Genentech, we were first told not to work on any antibodies based on the data from other antibody companies in 1985-1989. Based on early data shared by Dennis Slamon that showed women who have a subtype of breast cancer that was Her 2+ had a limited chance of survival of between 3 and 5 years. This study sparked the interest of several colleagues at Genentech and a small team organized to study this with the idea that an antibody targeting Her2+ could change the prognosis. The team grew as the data showed that such an antibody could kill Her2+ cancer cells. Given the potential of the antibody to be used as a drug made it easy to find people willing to work on this project. The antibody Her2+ (trastuzumab) was introduced in 1998 and was shown to be a new way to treat cancer. All of us on the ‘Home Team” were proud of our work. Over time, other discoveries have contributed to the success of using trastuzumab in treating Her2+ breast cancer. Many of these discoveries involved people who were not part of the original research team and not part of Genentech. Here are some examples:Understand the best chemotherapeutic to use with trastuzumab.Developing an Antibody Drug Conjugate (ADC) of trastuzumab, Kadcyla, to better target the chemotherapy to only the Her2+ cells as well as being active against cancer cells with lower levels of HER2+Pertuzumab was found to increase the efficacy of treating the target cancer without using chemotherapy.Extending the use of the drug to other indications such as stomach and esophageal Her2+ cancers.Developing a more robust trastuzumab ADC, trastuzumab deruxtecan, Enhertu has a longer overall survival rate than Kadcyla.
It’s this last point and what I have been asked by more than one person that reminds me of the treatment Caitlin Clark has received and still receives from the WNBA. When the Daiichi Sankyo and AstraZeneca drug, Enhertu, was first shown to result in a longer overall survival, I had people asking wasn’t I sorry that trastuzumab in the form of Kadcyla was not as ‘good’ as the Daiichi Sankyo and AstraZeneca’s ADC trastuzumab. This surprised me because I always believe that science builds on the shoulders of those who come before us.
From what I have read and seen she is an amazing player especially given that she is a rookie at the commercial level. She is even compared to Steph Curry (yes I am a Warriors fan). Yet she is being bullied constantly by more established players in the WNBA. Yes, there are those in drug development that only care about the status but in my experience, most of us are focused on how what we do can help others. I know I have learned a great deal from others, some even smarter than me, and what I have learned in turn allows me to help others to be successful in drug development.
When I say this, I am not just speaking of the trastuzumab story, but about the course of development in drug development and providing the best treatment. I always have that science builds on the shoulders of those who come before us. This is the best type of teamwork and this seems to be missing from the WNBA when it comes to supporting someone new rather than seeking out what they can learn.