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Creating a successful commercial organization: Delivering against our promise to help people living with cancer
With a proven track record of leading commercial teams, Ben joined Mirati as the Chief Commercial Officer looking for an opportunity to contribute value to a team already making a significant impact on human health and work with great people. Here, Ben shares his perspective on learning, listening, and having a growth mindset to be a successful organization.
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early all of us have been affected by cancer. Through a personal battle or the fight of a loved one, cancer has infiltrated many of our lives in countless ways, often resulting in heartbreak and devastation. But, in the wake of a cancer diagnosis, we also see hope, resilience and community perseverance. The battle against cancer is not fought alone, but rather waged together—including people living with cancer, their families, caretakers, oncologists, advocates and industry representatives—all seeking to give more time to live, and ultimately, put an end to these diseases that have brought significant pain and suffering
Throughout my career, I’ve sought opportunities to work with outstanding scientists, drug developers and commercialization colleagues to partner on innovations that can have a substantial impact on human health. Once you have been part of a team delivering transformative outcomes to patients, you don’t want to do anything else. Nothing scares me more than wasting a career on mediocrity. That innate drive to create solutions for difficult challenges, as well as a desire to make a significant impact on human outcomes, has fueled my commitment to people living with cancer. It’s the same fire that motivates so many of my colleagues at Mirati: Despite the challenge, we are relentlessly focused on creating better options to enable a life beyond cancer for patients and their families.
Our pipeline, and now, our products, are proof of our commitment to patients. The KRASG12C mutation is notoriously challenging, despite being the most commonly occurring KRAS mutation in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).1 Understanding the challenge and need for innovation, our scientists set out to create and deliver better treatments for patients. Now, there is a new option.
We are proud of our products’ potential as a new treatment option, and we’re especially excited to bring these life-changing options to people living with cancer. It’s not enough to create a new innovation; to ensure patient impact, they, their caretakers and their doctors must be educated about their treatment options, and they must have access. Mirati is working to ensure people living with cancer will have unrestricted and affordable patient access through competitive pricing, support services such as Mirati & Me and partnerships across the nation with community oncologists and distributors. We are also working to educate both patients and oncologists, as well as increasing testing and patient identification efforts, to ensure people living with cancer are matched with treatments that best meet their needs.
After more than 20 years of building and leading commercialization functions and capabilities at various organizations, I’m proud of the relentless dedication of Mirati’s team to improving the lives of people with cancer and the high level of scientific innovation we’ve maintained. We’re excited to continue driving value for the cancer community, and we have great potential to change people’s lives through our therapies.
At Mirati’s core is a willingness to learn, explore and adapt. By staying open to diverse perspectives and mindsets, we are able to continuously improve our work and make new discoveries. Mirati’s discovery programs are prime examples of this—our scientific curiosity will propel our future success as we continue developing and discovering new therapies in the targeted oncology space.
As we look to the future, Mirati has the opportunity to establish new standards of care for people living with cancer affected by the KRASG12C mutation globally. Through our products and pipeline, our potential for patient impact is significant. This opportunity means we needed to create, and now, sustain a commercial vehicle to deliver on our promise to patients and commitment to shareholders.
With the wealth of opportunity in our pipeline and our team driven, patient first culture, we have the opportunity to drive commercialization success, and deliver life-changing medicines to people living with cancer.