Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the Ice House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution for global growth for more than 225 years.
Speaker 1:
Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now, at the NYSE and at ICE's twelve exchanges and seven clearing houses around the world. Now, here's your host, Josh King, head of communications at Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
It's been far from quiet inside the ICE House this week. On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, we've welcomed four new companies into the Big Board Club, starting Monday with Elanco Animal Health. You can find that at NYSE ticker symbol ELAN, which came in to celebrate last Friday's initial public offering, followed by three additional IPOs with Lykes, RA Medical Systems, and Kootech listing in the following days. The week though belongs to Eli Lilly and Company and NYSE ticker symbol, LLY, a stalwart of the pharmaceutical sector, and one of the oldest companies listed on the exchange today. You see Elanco, which was the fifth largest IPO of 2018, raising 1.5 billion dollars was the culmination of months of work by Lilly to spin out its animal health division. Lilly's now following that success with the rollout of Emgality a new preventive treatment of migraines in adults, one that could dramatically improve the quality of life for more than 30 million Americans. Waking up early after a late night, awaiting FDA approval to release the treatment and joining us today in the library is Christi Shaw, senior vice president of Eli Lilly and Company and president of Lilly Biomedicines. Our conversation with Christi on this new treatment, how she became one of the most powerful leaders in the pharmaceutical industry, and why clinical treatments hit so close to home for her right after this.
Speaker 3:
You know when you're hanging at the beach when you start craving pizza, usually you panic and go hungry or worse, you make a pit stop at a sad food stand, but with Domino's hotspots, you can get pizza delivered right to the beach. In fact, now you can get Dominos delivered to over 150,000 unexpected outdoor locations, no address required, and now choose any two or more medium, two-topping pizzas for just $5.99 each, two item minimum, handmade pan pizzas will be extra. Ask for this limited time offer. Prices, participation, delivery area, and charges may vary, restrictions apply. Visit dominos.com for detail on Domino's hotspots.
Josh King:
Our guest today, Christi Shaw, senior vice president of Eli Lilly and Company and president of Lilly Biomedicines could be called a pharmaceutical power player. After graduating from Iowa State University, with a degree in marketing, Christi, headed to Eli Lilly, working her way up the ranks in a series of pharmaceutical sales and marketing roles. She later held a series of increasingly responsible roles in the Janssen and Ethicon Subsidiaries of Johnson and Johnson. You can find that at NYSE, ticker symbol, JNJ, and served as the United States country head and president of Novartis Corporation and find that at NVS. Last year, though, Christi returned to Eli Lilly where she's accountable for Lilly global biomedicines, which includes immunology, pain, and neuroscience, seeing prescription medicines from the beginning stages of clinical development through to the final commercial approval of those products. Christi Shaw, welcome to the Ice House.
Christi Shaw:
Thank you, Josh. I'm so happy to be here on this special time for migraine patients.
Josh King:
Your first visit to the exchange?
Christi Shaw:
Yes, actually it is.
Josh King:
Christi, tell us about Emgality and what makes this preventive migraine treatment so special?
Christi Shaw:
So, first of all, the reason it's special is because of so many patients suffering that needs something to help them with their migraines. In the US alone, we have over 30 million adult patients suffering from migraine, and it costs the United States 56 billion dollars a year. So there hasn't been any new innovations for over two decades. And now with Emgality, we're able to help those patients. We found in our studies that patients who had over four headaches a month were able to reduce their headaches, cut them in half, actually. And there's also the hope of being migraine free. Emgality is the only new innovation that has the promise and hope for patients of really reducing their headaches a hundred percent in any given month.
Josh King:
It doesn't affect me, but it's certainly in my family. My brother suffers from them all the time. Why no new innovations in two decades?
Christi Shaw:
Well it's not for lack of effort. We found a CGRP in the early eighties and having to design it in a way that it is safe and effective, took us some time. And I think now, as we look at the studies with Emgality, we're doing a study in kids right now, that's how safe and effective we feel that it is.
Josh King:
How will this new preventive treatment stop symptoms before they happen?
Christi Shaw:
So once a month you take an injection. And the good news is this autoinjector that we use at Lilly is the same that we use for our diabetic population. So used by over a million patients. So it's pretty easy to take.
Josh King:
How do you actually take it?
Christi Shaw:
So you actually put it where you're going to put your injection, which a lot of times it's in the abdomen, it's the least painful. You click it, push it, and it automatically goes into your abdomen itself by itself. And you don't even see the needle. And then on the second click is when you know it's done. And so it's pretty easy for them to do, and it's once a month.
Josh King:
I look at my brother growing up, and my mom says, "Oh, he has a terrible headache." And I'm not aware yet of the differences between migraine and what we commonly refer to as a headache. These symptoms can affect anyone though. They are three times more common in women than men. They're also highly stigmatized and under-reported as headaches. Why is that?
Christi Shaw:
So I think a big piece of it, to your point about your brother having a headache, is it takes a long time for a migraine patient to actually get a diagnosis. They typically go in and if they have a headache, they tell them to take over the counter medication. They come in again and said, it's not working. And they may either give you an opioid, something stronger, or they may send you for MRIs, neurological exams. And once they rule all of that out, in the physician's mind they're relieved because nothing in their mind that's really serious is happening. But for the patient, they're debilitating, they're missing days and weeks out of their month, and these women are typically in their thirties and forties. They have a career, they have kids, they're the leader of the household. They really are the ones that need help. And so in diagnosing it, it's really symptom based and it's really ruling everything else out before you actually get a diagnosis.
Josh King:
So for among the 220 or 280 million who aren't among the 30 million that have experienced a migraine and have this stigmatized view, the way it's propagated in popular culture, and sometimes looked askance at, as you take it into the laboratory and look at some of your patients, for our listeners, what's actually happening in the brain? What are people experiencing when they're getting a migraine?
Christi Shaw:
So we all have something called CGRP circulating in our body and our system. And the current thinking is that too much CGRP is what causes the headaches. So the newer agents that have come out, Emgality specifically wraps the extra CGRP, and flushes it out of your body. Some stay on the receptor and don't leave, but ours is really the get it out of the body pretty fast. And because it's working, that validates that CGRP is one of the causes of migraine.
Josh King:
One of the most prevalent conditions worldwide, migraines are a 2016 analysis of the global burden of disease study reported it to be the second highest cause of disability worldwide, but only 10% of people who are candidates for preventive therapy are currently taking a treatment. Any reason the number's so low?
Christi Shaw:
Absolutely. There really hasn't been a preventative migraine medicine that's been studied for that. The medicines that those patients are taking might be blood pressure medications, they are antidepressants, and they're just not as effective for this treatment, nor have they been studied for it. There are triptans used for acute use, but they're not always useful for patients who have chronic migraine.
Josh King:
According to the medical expenditures panel survey, the total unadjusted cost associated with migraine in the US, is estimated to be as high as $56 billion annually. Why isn't there more concern about this?
Christi Shaw:
That's a really great question. There really should be. It reminds me of the days of when Lilly launched Prozac for depression, I remember people didn't talk about depression. It was a stigma. And if you talked about it, you were either ridiculed or you might be put in a mental health institute. And today it's a common disorder that is okay to talk about. With migraine we find studies show that people do think it's just a headache, even your partner or your in-laws, a high percentage of them actually think their loved one could just get over it, and that maybe they're missing things on purpose. And so when you say you have a migraine and people interpret it as just a headache, it makes you feel very alone. And basically you're isolated emotionally, as well as physically when you have to put yourself in a room that's dark without sound for many hours. And so I think with these new innovations, it's time for us to be able to say, not only do we have a diagnosis and need to be aware, but we have a solution. And I think that's one of the pieces of why we don't do a lot about migraine. Because if there's no solution, what are you exactly going to do?
Josh King:
Can you walk us through the process of this pharmaceutical development from the point that inside the company you say here's a drug that we're ready to do trials on and how you get to the point of commercial rollout?
Christi Shaw:
When we say we discovered CGRP, that's a science within itself to actually find the peptide in your body, and what do you have to do to counteract it, is all a part of the discovery process. It's really where the really smart Lilly scientists reside. Once you actually think you have a drug that actually could work for the disease, then you actually go into phase one trials. And what phase one trials are is very few patients getting the medication, healthy volunteers to make sure it's safe and to see what the side effects are. And then you can actually go...
Josh King:
How many people would that be in a phase one trial?
Christi Shaw:
The very first one's probably 10, 15 patients. And once you know it's safe, nothing bad happened, then you would do dose ranging studies, which is still phase one. You'd try to find out what is the right dose that we need to use. So you'd have multiple different doses. And then again, you'd have a small number of patients, not that small, it'd be little bit larger than that. And then once you have the main dose or doses, that's when you go into what we call a phase two trial. Now in a phase two trial, you're actually trying to prove efficacy. First is safety, make sure you're not hurting patients, first do no harm. Phase two is to say, is this going to work? And so you will have, not your final trial, but a large group of patients that you test in a shorter period of time that says, is this working? And then last, then you go into a huge randomized phase three clinical trial where you have hundreds or depending on the disease, sometimes thousands of patients and testing it versus placebo and versus other doses. And sometimes you're testing it versus standard of care to make sure that you're better than what's already out there.
Josh King:
This is not something you say, hey, let's try and get this, get all through this in like two months, is it?
Christi Shaw:
No.
Josh King:
So talk us through how long it takes to get from those 10 to 15 candidates in the phase one trial to these thousands of candidates in the phase three, and from where you very start until you finish, because it's a marathon.
Christi Shaw:
Well, the biggest thing that you have to show, if you're going from phase one to phase two, so you've found that it's safe, and now you're going into phase two. What you have to prove is that it works. And so for each disease, it's different. If you're in cancer and you want to prove that the drug works, usually you can do that pretty fast. I remember we had, when I was at Novartis, we had a phase two trial with 28 patients and we were on the market in six months. But if you're treating a patient with psoriasis, for example, you can also show that pretty quickly, not as quick as cancer, but you can show it within a few months whether that psoriasis is working, and then you'll do a long open label for 52 weeks to make sure of it's long-term safety.
Christi Shaw:
And then you have all the way when you have prevention medications. When you have to show that you're preventing something from happening, that's a lot harder and those take a lot longer because the disease isn't there to make it go away. You're actually trying to prevent it from coming. So then you have to have a baseline of how often does it happen? Did you actually reduce headaches the next month? And what about the few months after that? And then you have the open label, which means you're not in the versus placebo anymore, but we're following you to make sure that you're safe and the drug hasn't had a negative impact.
Josh King:
So people that are listening to this podcast in a dark room without any light, but they shouldn't be listening to the podcast if they're dealing with a migraine and have quiet, but let's say they are anyway. Now that the preventive treatment has received FDA approval, what's the path for patient access? Is it a visit to a neurologist for a prescription or something more?
Christi Shaw:
Yeah, this is really near and dear to my heart. I took a year off to care for my sister and I thought I knew, being in the pharmaceutical industry for decades, what it was like for patients. And being a caregiver, patient access, the complexity of it, it was eyeopening, especially for a cancer patient where you think that would never happen. So it was really important to us with all of these patients suffering that they can get immediate patient access. So while we're in negotiations with the major payers and we are, and they're very amenable to giving access, but it takes time. We are actually going to give commercial patients Emgality for free up to 12 months. So they can start right away. They can make an appointment with their neurologist and they can access their first induction dose, either in the office or the physician can get it off the internet and they can come back and get it in the office. And for those patients who don't have commercial insurance, they can't afford their medicine, we will give it to them for free through our patient assistance.
Josh King:
And then after this first year of offering it for free, how much will Emgality cost after that?
Christi Shaw:
The cost is $575 a month. And our goal is to make sure that patients don't have to pay a lot of money out of their own pocket, if they have insurance, obviously.
Josh King:
On the broader topic of pharmaceutical costs, the associated press released analysis findings this week, which pointed to more price hikes as opposed to price cuts for prescription drug costs. Health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, also a former Eli Lilly and Company executive said, and I'm quoting here, "I'm not counting on the altruism of pharma companies lowering their prices." You've spoken frequently about the controversy surrounding drug pricing. I want to listen to what you said at the Eye for Pharma Conference in Barcelona earlier this year. Let's listen.
Christi Shaw:
We need to be a part of the solution that says, "Let's stop fighting about drug pricing, and let's actually come together with payers, with the government, with policy makers, and let's actually do something that shows what the value is. Can we stop the supply and demand?"
Josh King:
So with Emgality you are trying to prove your value over a year for all these patients who need it, but in the broader sense, proving the value of pharmaceuticals?
Christi Shaw:
Yes. So we have digital technology in almost every other industry and the medical communities, really the last industry and probably the most important one where we should have it. When we look at outcomes for patients, we're looking at that 56 billion dollars that you talked about that migraine costs, and trying to say, let's measure, if it's 56 billion dollars does using Emgality reduce the burden and the cost to society? And we need to measure that. And if the healthcare system could measure that, we have some things right now that are blocking us from doing that. There are laws that need to be reformed, like the anti-kickback statute so that we can work together and also in ensuring that we have that digital data. Now the good news is that digital data is coming, and it's not too far along. We have already now, there's artificial intelligence that already today can read radiological scans and actually diagnose dermatological conditions.
Christi Shaw:
And they do it just as good as a human physician. And we also see in Alzheimer's disease, Lilly introduced in 2012 brain imagery scans that actually can diagnose Alzheimer's, a disease where 20% of the time it's misdiagnosed. So now we can diagnose it sooner and quicker and hoping that will lead us to medicine to stop the progression. So it's there already. So imagine a patient and you're measuring a patient's heart rate, you're measuring their movement, you're measuring their sleep, and as you measure those, you could actually start to measure when a migraine's going to happen before the patient even knows it. And then you could put an algorithm together that says, okay, when my migraine's starting to come on, send a text to Dad and the kids and tell them, order a pizza for dinner tonight and have it delivered. And if you have smart apps in the house, close the shades, dim the lights, and have no sound in the room. And so as we look at those things that can help patients and that we can measure, we can also then validate through digital technology, do you have less migraines this month than you did the month before? And if you have fewer migraines this month than last month, then you know it's working.
Josh King:
The convergence of the consumer technology that we buy and wear with what's happening in the innovation laboratories of pharmaceutical companies, you must be seeing amazing opportunities if you look forward either six months or six years?
Christi Shaw:
Absolutely. And we need to do a few things to make that real, first, the patient access piece. We have to make sure that we're reimbursing, not just for the medicine, but they reimburse for the technology as well. And that's one of the hurdles that we're facing that we need to address. We also need the payer does need to see value and we can measure that through the digital technology I talked about. But for migraine, specifically, we also need to acknowledge that it's a real disease and that it's a neurological disorder. It's not just a headache. Patients that are living with migraine deserve access and deserve for their medication and digital technology to be reimbursed.
Josh King:
After the break I speak with Christi about her path to becoming a senior executive at Eli Lilly, and what sparked her interest in pharmaceuticals. That's right after this.
Speaker 1:
Billions of dollars in funding have been cut from youth sports programs in recent years, leaving millions of students unable to play. Dick's Sporting Goods believe sports matter, sports build character, increase confidence and motivate kids to stay in school and aim for higher education. Since 2014, Dicks and the Dick's Foundation have committed 50 million dollars through their sports matter initiative to combat the youth sports funding crisis. To date, they're humbled to have helped over one million youth athletes in need across all 50 states. Learn more about this crisis of youth [email protected].
Josh King:
Back with Christi Shaw, senior vice president and president of Lilly Biomedicines. Christi, I want to go back in time to 1989, you're a proud Midwesterner receiving your undergraduate degree from Iowa State and your MBA from the University of Wisconsin. What originally drew you to the pharmaceutical industry?
Christi Shaw:
So I'm smiling because I was the first person in our family to go to college. And...
Josh King:
What did your parents do?
Christi Shaw:
My mom was a stay at home mom and also very philanthropic. Towards the end of her life, she owned a drive-in. So she was an entrepreneur the last few years of her life. And my father was actually in the heavy crane and excavator business. And we moved every couple of years because as he got promoted or a new job, the family moved. And so for him, he was always my role model. And I thought, "Well, so was my mom." So if I looked at what my dad did and thought that's really a cool business using your brain and debating and making things better, and then I looked at my mom, who's philanthropic and said, "But how can I help people?" When I learned about the pharmaceutical industry, I thought, "What a great job. I can do business, and I can help patients." And it sounds like, oh yeah, that sounds that I don't know if people believe that's true, but my whole life, as I'm doing this job now, I still feel like it's exactly what I want to do. Especially when I took time off for a year, I thought, "Do I actually want to come back to the pharmaceutical industry?" And it so much is, because I can help so many patients in the role that I'm in.
Josh King:
Did Lilly find you out of Iowa State or out of Wisconsin? Did you go to work first?
Christi Shaw:
So yeah, I was at Iowa state and I was graduating in December, and I flew to Chicago to interview with Lilly. But the only reason I got that opportunity was because they were hiring IT people on campus, not business, not marketing people. And so I went through the interviews and when I got close to getting an offer, I said, "I really don't want to do this. I really want to go into sales and marketing." And so that gentleman actually got me the interview and then when I got the interview, there was no boss in the Chicago office. So they said, "Can you wait?" I said, "No, it's December, and I have to move out of my dorm room and I have nowhere to go." Back to the farm in Iowa, my dad said, "When I turn 18, I'm out of the house." So the HR woman, who'd only been in her job a couple of months, hired me without management. So here's a woman who took a risk on me to come into the corporation. And I smile because it's a lot of people taking risks on other people that really, what to say, pay it forward that really makes life fun.
Josh King:
Your first chapter at Lilly was a long one, 14 years. And then you moved to subsidiaries of Johnson and Johnson. What was your biggest takeaway from moving from this place that, you got your first opportunity from the HR person without a manager, you have moved through the organization for 14 years and then it's time for J&J?
Christi Shaw:
So what I learned at Lilly, I took with me even today and one of the reasons I came back, I learned about the patient journey. And I've also learned that it's not the same in every company when we talk about the patient journey. Everyone talks about what the patient says, but to live it and breathe it every day, if you look at what we do with migraine, for example, our whole meetings with all of our people as we go to launch meeting, we'll actually demonstrate to them what it's like to have a migraine. We just launched a medicine for rheumatoid arthritis. We actually have something on campus called Anna's House. And the first time I walked through it I got teary eyed because I actually was dressed up in a way that I couldn't put my earrings on. I couldn't open a pill bottle, so...
Josh King:
Sort of like the work that the MIT age lab does, put people in harnesses and straight jackets, so they have to live like a senior citizen.
Christi Shaw:
Or when we teach men what it's like to be pregnant, and we put the big thing around their waist to have to walk around with all that extra weight.
Josh King:
Not volunteering.
Christi Shaw:
But yes, like that. And so then what we do is we have these moments of truth is where is the patient suffering through that disease journey? Is it they're not getting diagnosed fast enough or when they get diagnosed, they're not getting access to the therapies they need, or once they get the therapy they need, they can't get it. What are the issues that Lilly can help them with? And so that is the biggest thing I learned that I took forward with me. And many of the people on the East Coast would say, "How'd you become so patient centric?" I said, "First, I think it's because of why I chose what I'm doing. But second, and I think it's the learning that I got from Lilly."
Josh King:
So fast forward, it's 2010, another career move this time to the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, where you were named North America Region, head of oncology, and then the US country head and president of Novartis Pharmaceuticals. What was the experience like entering this new chapter as a top executive?
Christi Shaw:
So when I first entered Novartis, it was for North America oncology business. And I thought after my mom died of breast cancer, there's no way I'm ever going to work in oncology. I can't watch people die and give them drugs that make them feel bad. I want to give them medicines that make them feel good. And so I got a phone call from the global oncology leader, and I sat down with him at a restaurant for a cup of coffee. And he drew on a napkin a rocket ship and the moon, and he said, "We are on a rocket with a goal to get to the moon." And he told me about the story of GLEEVEC, and GLEEVEC is for chronic myeloid leukemia. It is a pill you take once a day, and you don't die from chronic myeloid leukemia. You live the rest of your life. You turn, basically, a death sentence into a chronic disease.
Christi Shaw:
And so when I heard that story and thought, "Wow, I could be part of something that's actually going to save people's lives." I couldn't think of anything more that I wanted to do. So three weeks later I was doing that job. I had no experience in oncology. I was running clinical development as well as commercial. He took a big, big chance on me and we were very successful together. It also helped me later in life understand what my sister was going through when she went through cancer. But I'll tell you one thing about that experience. When I went to Novartis, I learned that in 1996, the year my mom passed away, there were clinical trials that were completed and a new set of drugs, the aromatase inhibitors were approved in that same year. And my mom was in rural Iowa. Had she gotten into a clinical trial, she would've lived another three to five years of a quality life. And today many metastatic breast cancer patients live decades. It's amazing what's happened, but for her, I didn't know that. And so that's why it was even more important with my sister that I was there to help her and navigate through clinical trials with her.
Josh King:
You mentioned the conversation you were having with your colleagues at Novartis and called it, "A rocket to the moon effort." It's interesting that metaphor comes up because in the second Obama term, similar metaphors come forward as President Obama enlists Vice President Biden to run the cancer moonshot. Certainly we all are aware that his son Beau died of brain cancer. At the same time, we watched Senator Ted Kennedy deal with that same tumor and even most recently, Senator John McCain. So what's your outlook in the future of oncology medicine?
Christi Shaw:
So when I was new in cancer, not to give a plug, but I will. I read Sid Mukherjee's book, The Emperor of All Mallodies, and it's attuned and it received a Nobel prize. That told to basically walk through the origins of cancer and how we treated up all the way through modern time. And after you read that, to be in the time that we are right now, where patients aren't being mutilated when they have cancer, having their shoulder cut off if they have breast cancer, we actually have advanced so far with so many industries connecting and having patients today be able to live long lives, not every type of cancer, but many type of cancer. And the mapping of the human genome was one great advancement that has allowed us to get to where we are. And so when the story of GLEEVEC that I told you, we thought that targeted agents that blocked BCR abl, like we did in leukemia, chronic myeloma leukemia would be the way to cure cancer.
Christi Shaw:
And so all of the industry was going after targeted agents. What's the mutation and what do we have to do to block the mutation? But what we found is cancer's too smart. The one line in the book that sticks with me is, cancer is a distorted form of a normal cell. So to me, I like to think of it as people hate cancer. It's your normal cell that's gone awry and it fights so hard because it thinks it's protecting you. And when you use these targeted agents, it just finds another route. And that's how we live so long is that's what it does. So what we found actually that many of the companies missed out on is that immuno-oncology, how do you take your own immune system to fight cancer? And obviously we see that that has been a tremendous advancement all the way up to not even just the pd1 inhibitors, et cetera, but you look at the CAR T programs where they basically rev up your T-cells.
Christi Shaw:
So it's not even a medicine. It's a way of actually treating a patient so that you can actually live longer and without cancer because your own immune system has attacked the cancer. So where do I see, it's a long way to tell you that's where we are today. What do I see in the future? I see a lot more cancers being turned into chronic conditions. And I see this CAR T as something that it'll take a while, but we know that we've got chronic, we've got kids with a certain type of leukemia that are living where it used to be a death sentence just a few years ago. And for many types of multiple myeloma, we're hoping as we find specific targets for that, that not only will you, won't have to just turn it into a chronic disease. You'll actually be cured.
Josh King:
We've been talking about this career progression since the break that started with 14 years at Lilly and moves to Johnson and Johnson, and then goes to Novartis and your emerging expertise in oncology and cancer. And then in 2016 you go in a different direction. You made the decision to step down from Novartis to become a caretaker for your sister, Sherry, that you mentioned earlier, who'd entered into an immunotherapy clinical trial at the University of Pennsylvania for patients fighting multiple myeloma. I'm sure at UPenn they have the best doctors and care available, but there also needs to be a family member and a friend. So here comes the big decision about all these years of your career that you focused on that, and your decision to say, "I got to put that on hold." Why?
Christi Shaw:
You know a lot of people have said to me, that was such a courageous decision. And I'd like to say that it was a tough decision that I consternated on because that's what people think. But it really wasn't. My sister cared for our mother when she had breast cancer and was in hospice on our farm in Iowa. And without parents and she being my older sister, only two years older, she'd been through all the therapies that were available in the marketplace. And I had already said to my husband, "If we're lucky enough to get into this program at Upenn," it requires you to have a caregiver, number one. But number two, seeing my dad through the healthcare system, when things went wrong, it's when he was there by himself versus the people who are with them all the way along that know the history, know what's been done, not been done and can navigate that complexity.
Christi Shaw:
So when I found out that she was able to get into the trial, I called my husband. I remember clearly from my office and said, "She's in the trial, so I'm going to resign." And he goes, "Okay, see at home." So it was just like that. And I don't know if it's the Midwest upbringing, we were always taught duty, family first, all of those kinds of things. So I also thought to myself, when people ask me the questions, "Well, what would I do," because at the end of my life, what do I wish I would've done? And there's no doubt that had I not done that I would've regretted it.
Josh King:
What surprised you most about that process of care taking, how long did that journey last?
Christi Shaw:
I was off for a year up until the point where my sister needed a bone marrow transplant, and your siblings are the best prospect for donating, but yet each sibling only has a 25% chance of matching. So I didn't match. I was only a 50% match, but our younger sister did 100% match. We were very lucky. So then what happened was she quit her job and went to care for my sister at the same time that Lilly called me and asked me if I would consider coming back.
Josh King:
So tell me how the treatment unfolded.
Christi Shaw:
After all of this work on the clinical trials, she had been in the hospital for 20 days and wanted to come home. One of the physicians said, "No, your platelets are too low." The other one said, "You got to live life, go ahead and spend the weekend." She had the best weekend with her grandkids, and daughter, and son-in-law. And then unfortunately the next day she had a fall in the kitchen and because her platelets were so low, she bled and left us pretty quickly.
Josh King:
So sorry to hear that.
Christi Shaw:
Thank you so much. You know as time passes by, we knew we were towards the end, and so I tried to see it as a blessing that she didn't suffer anymore.
Josh King:
What are the ways in which people who are affected by these types of diseases, cancer today, to learn about the trials and get alerted that these opportunities might be available for them?
Christi Shaw:
So there's a lot of different links online that if you just search for breast cancer trials near me, there's a lot of different apps that you can use. But the one thing that was remarkable to me when we were in Pennsylvania, my sister was one of the only patients in the trial that were from out of town. And so I asked the nurse, "Why aren't there more?" And she said, "Well, because people can't afford it." And so one of the things that she's left us to keep her memory on is my younger sister and I started a foundation called More Moments, More Memories to help patients access clinical trials by paying for their travel, their food, their lodging, and for them and a caregiver, because many times it's required that you have a caregiver with you.
Josh King:
Have you seen people able to take advantage now of More Moments, More Memories, because it must be one of the most challenging aspects of it to say you're in a trial, some of your expenses are being taken care of, but that doesn't account for everything that you have to account for to move to Philadelphia for this long period?
Christi Shaw:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. So part of what we found with the foundation is there's the financial support, but there is a lot of helping them also navigate themselves that there are places that can help you. So my sister and I stayed at Cancer Hope Lodge, which usually are throughout the United States and close to cancer centers. And you can stay there for free as long as they have availability. And so there's all areas like that that we also put on our website so that they can study that.
Christi Shaw:
But it is true, it doesn't pay for everything, but it atleast gets them motivated to be able to go and see if that clinical trial is right for them. And the stories from patients, we had one patient who had to go from Iowa out to the West Coast and she gave us video back and it's on our website, but she actually wrote, she actually felt like, they stopped in Mount Rushmore along the way, she said, "For one day I felt like I was on vacation and I didn't have cancer." And so those unintended consequences or stories that we hear back are so rewarding, because that's really what we're trying to do with, the name of the foundation is trying to give. If I had one more moment with my mom, if I had one more moment with my sister, my dad, what that would be worth for memories for the rest of your life. And so that's why we do what we do.
Josh King:
You made the decision in April of 2017 to return to Lilly, as you said, where your career had launched really nearly 30 years ago, running the biomedicines unit of Lilly. Tell us about the new role.
Christi Shaw:
So it's so exciting. I feel so fortunate. We're launching in 13 new disease states in six years. I mean, usually you don't get six new launches in 13 years and here we're doing 13 in 6. And so to be able to help so many patients, so working in immunology, it's the opposite of oncology. So in oncology, you're trying to stop that proliferation. And in immunology you do the opposite to the immune system that you do in cancer, so that's been interesting. And I see the future there as possibly being able to leverage the learnings in oncology. And then the neuroscience division with Alzheimer's disease, we had five failed phase three studies in Alzheimer's, but the advancement in the science hasn't been done by anybody more than by Lilly. And so we understand so much more that now we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, that we will, somebody will have a medicine for Alzheimer's disease. And near and dear to my heart today and learning so much about migraine patients, these are women that are just like me and my friends that could really use some help. And when you help them, you help their entire family. Because they're so dependent on mom, right? And then, happy wife, happy life, I think, they say too.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Christi Shaw:
So being able to make that kind of an impact is humbling. It's not just a medicine we're delivering, we're giving back patients' days and moments in their life.
Josh King:
This journey that we've been on over the past 30 or 40 minutes or so, working your way up through these companies, Lilly, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, the career moves that you've made, making the decision to take time off to care for Sherry, such an impressive journey really. What advice would you give to a young person starting off who might be in that position that you were at Iowa State when Lilly comes calling?
Christi Shaw:
That's a great question. I'll give a couple things of advice, which I'll tell you here. One is people talk about don't let success go to your head, which is true. I want to say that. But at the same time, don't let failure go to your heart. And so you do need to fail in life. You need to take risks. Don't be afraid, because the biggest advancements in my career and in life is when I took chances. So in my career, huge chances to run North America Oncology at a European company, and I don't know anything about oncology or running medical affairs, that was a chance. Quitting my job and caring for my sister gave me a huge emotional leap that I wouldn't have otherwise had. And so taking those risks and saying to yourself at the end of your life, if you're looking back, what is the decision you wish you would've made? It makes it a lot more clear.
Josh King:
Thanks so much, Christi Shaw, for joining us in the Ice House.
Christi Shaw:
Thank you, Josh.
Josh King:
Great advice.
Christi Shaw:
Thanks.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Christi Shaw, senior vice president for Eli Lilly and president of Lilly Biomedicines. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at NYSE. Our show is produced by Theresa DeLuca and Pete Ash with production assistance from Ken Able and Steven Porter. I'm Josh King signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of this information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or recommendation of any security or trading practice.
