Silicon Valley’s C-Suite Innovation in Oncology Dinner — Key Takeaways

Last week, the leaders of Slalom’s Healthcare and Life Science teams hosted an intimate dinner to serve as a connective tissue among Chief Executives in the Bay Area specific to the oncology space, who are passionate about the latest innovations and clinical advances in cancer care, research and treatment. The idea stemmed from the recent success of Project Smile, a collaboration of American Cancer Society, Google and Slalom to move the needle on predicting breast cancer using machine learning.

We had the pleasure of hosting 40 C-level executives with a discussion focused around sharing some of the latest innovations and clinical advances in cancer care, research and treatment.

Guiding this conversation was our panel of experts including Dr. Michael H. Melner, American Cancer Society, Sr. Scientific Program Director, Molecular Genetics of Cancer and Michelle Yi, Slalom, Practice Area Lead & Founder of Slalom’s Innovation for Good and CK from Google Cloud’s Global Healthcare & Life Sciences practice.

We talked about partnering in 2020 and beyond, as well as the importance of stepping up, accelerating each other’s missions, and thinking differently — because the same traditional, siloed methods of approaching cancer will not result in new breakthroughs.

We were glad to be joined by a diverse set of attendees, from the entire cancer care ecosystem: drug manufacturers, scientists, data engineers, medical devices companies, healthcare providers, from both large corporations, start-ups, and non-profit organizations. All of us were fortunate to spend this time with this small group of leaders who were extremely generous in the sharing of their perspectives, experiences and the trends they are seeing.

Here are the top 7 lessons and ideas we heard through the conversations. We hope this inspires our readers to do more and to keep strengthening the connective tissue that is needed to win against cancer. It also aims at summarizing valuable insights and sparking new ideas for your upcoming conversations in the space with your stakeholders.

1. Data collection and access is still a key issue to tackle — establishing standards, investing in their adoption across stakeholders through cross-industry consortium and leveraging technology in an innovative way to address this is a must priority. The healthcare industry is fragmented, and many companies are trying to do the same thing. There is a big opportunity to develop communities and integrate data.
2. Collaboration across the stakeholders is another hurdle. Innovative partnerships and collaboration mechanisms, as well as new mindsets and approaches to managing these alliances, will be key to produce meaningful outcomes in a sustained mode.
3. Prevention and a comprehensive approach to care constitute the new norm: this includes early and continuous diagnostic, pills enhanced with sensors to monitor treatment and adherence, in-patient connected devices for disease detection and management and real-time connectivity with the care team, solutions to alleviate stress… the list grows longer as we assemble the pieces of the new care approach.
4. It takes time! Technology is not the roadblock, but its adoption certainly is. Stakeholders will need to solve the double edge sword effect — on one side, technology is creating greater concerns with data privacy, and on the other side, our society never has been more eager and technology literate to use trusted solutions. As an illustration, all the technological means and solutions to create patient digital twins to better plan and anticipate issues or simulate treatments prior to real interventions are already available. However, trust from patients is not there. Adoption and roll-out of 5G technologies is another example where acceleration would help, while it can be used for precision remote diagnostic and treatment, or even for surgeries.
5. Scientific advancement is going at an accelerated pace for breakthrough discoveries and treatments: in men’s health, for example, focal laser ablation is an emerging treatment paradigm for prostate cancer that aims to successfully eradicate disease while also reducing the risk of side effects compared to whole-gland therapies. Personalized cell-based therapies are quickly becoming the new norm and providing cures to life threatening, hard to treat, conditions for the first time in the history of medicine.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is helping and can help even further: Several companies are seeing great results from AI where the data is well understood, such as who will be most likely to fully commit to a trial. AI has been outperforming the human eye consistently when analyzing images and often there can be hundreds of images that are waiting for humans to review in emergency situations. AI can help prioritize the order of care which will save lives. It’s been said recently that the fourth leading cause of death (beyond accidents, heart-related and cancer) are mistakes in healthcare and that AI can make a big difference in training and reducing error rates.
7. Lastly, focus on the patient is increasingly important: personalized approaches will be the new norm as the cost for these decreases.

These conversations are only the start of how we would like to serve as a platform for these creative collaborations. Specifically, in areas where Slalom can use our expertise in/around technology to accelerate the mission of organizations in the Healthcare & Life Science space, and how together we can significantly move the needle on cancer.

If you’d like to stay part of future conversations or to learn more about Slalom’s work in this area, please email Aisha Quaintance, Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry Solutions, Slalom at Aisha@Slalom.com.

Slalom partners with healthcare, biotech and pharmaceutical leaders to strengthen their organizations, improve their systems, and help with some of their most strategic business challenges. Find out more about our people, our company and what we do.

Related Links:

• Google Next Keynote Presentation: https://youtu.be/O7yorZdXQp4?t=2339
• Google NEXT Customer Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_aiQXJoHqM&feature=youtu.be&t=820
• Google-ACS-Slalom Article: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/customers/american-cancer-society-uses-google-cloud-machine-learning-to-power-cancer-research
• Google-ACS-Slalom Article 2: https://cloud.google.com/customers/american-cancer-society/