Making Sure Drug Innovations Are Getting to Patients: Eli Lilly Executive Vice President Jake Van Naarden

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Every once in a while, we think there's some value in giving the SurvivorNet community access to some key players in the oncology ecosystem who have tremendous influence over what medications ultimately make it into the oncologist’s office. Recently, at the country’s largest cancer conference, ASCO, we had the chance to sit down with Jake Van Naarden, Executive Vice President at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.

Van Naarden runs oncology for Lilly, and has a profound sense of mission.

“We’ve all had the friends, family, professional life experience of that sort of bomb that falls in your lap. That phone call that sort of sends your head spinning,” Van Naarden said of the unfortunate experience of getting the news about a cancer diagnosis.

Lilly is a major player in breast cancer with and an entrant in the class of drugs called CDK4/6 inhibitors, which help stop cancer cell division and growth. Lilly’s drug, Verzenio (generic name abemaciclib), is approved for women with hormone receptor-positive (HR+), HER2-negative breast cancers in metastatic patients. In some earlier stage patients at a higher risk of their cancer coming back, the drug has also been proven to help prevent recurrence.

“When you can intervene early and potentially cure a patient or prevent the long-term recurrence of distant metastatic disease, that’s among the most impactful things that we as an oncology field can do. And as a pharmaceutical company, it’s one of the most impactful ways we can bring our innovation to patients,” Van Naarden said.

“It’s an unfortunate reality that I think our innovation hopefully over time can either reduce those kinds of phone calls over time in the best-case scenario or at least make those phone calls a little bit less scary,” he added.

Increasing Access To Medications

“I don’t take a lot of pleasure in reporting that, you know, for patients with newly diagnosed metastatic breast cancer, still in the United States, only 60-70% receive one of these drugs as their initial therapy,” he said.

“So that means that 30 to 40% of patients are not getting drugs that have proven clinical benefits. We need to improve that.”

Eli Lilly says the next step lies with on-the-ground education for physicians.

“We need … physicians to make sure they’re up to speed on the latest data coming out of conferences … so that they’re adopting the medicines that can most impact [patient] lives,” he said.

This helps make sure “that those medicines are adopted for the right patient so that the outcomes that we’ve observed in clinical trials can actually be felt by public health and by individual human beings.”

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