Susan Desmond-Hellmann
speaker
362 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Susan Desmond-Hellmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So I had a lot of different reactions. First of all, with Avastin, it was the first time I remember reading, and I think it was one of those curtain raiser things in the Wall Street Journal for the breast cancer study. The headline was, Avastin might help breast cancer patients, but can they afford to take it?
I was shocked that it was the first time I had read, and as long as I had been at Genentech, that somebody couldn't afford one of our drugs. That instead of saying, oh, isn't that cool? Rituxan, Herceptin, Avastin, it was too much money. And that felt really important to me and really not good.
We had as a company a philosophy that no patient should go without any of our drugs because of an inability to pay. So we had a bunch of patient, what do you call those, patient support programs or whatever. So we had a bunch of different things in place. So I knew we had those programs, but that doesn't help the patients in the UK.
And it doesn't help the overall cost because we're actually supplementing, but the cost is still really high. And we started to have a lot more discussion at the executive committee about the price and how we would think about it and how we would price the drugs. Because that was, like I say, that was not good.
We're in the 90s.
So first of all, on the Genentech side of things, Roche bought us.
That was 2009. Oh, 2009.
2009, which was not what we wanted.
Yeah. They call it in the business world, a squeeze out. They squeezed us out. So I knew I was going to leave. I knew I was going to do something different. And UCSF, I had been really close with the chief of medicine who was my chief of medicine when I was an intern, Holly Smith. Do you know Holly Smith?
So Holly Smith was a South Carolinian, Harvard-trained doctor. amazing person. And between him and Bill Rutter, who founded Chiron, who's a biochemist, they decided a long time ago that UCSF should not be a backwater medical school and should be a serious medical school.
So Holly on the clinical front and Bill on the scientific front just decided they would start recruiting people to have a great institution, like a pretty amazing thing.
It was probably 80s, 70s, 80s. I was still friends with Holly. I just think there's so many wonderful things about Holly that I admired that I was still friends with him. So Holly called me and said, Mike Bishop is stepping down. Of Bishop and Varmus, that bishop.
And you should be chancellor. Of course, I said to Holly, I'm not a professor. And I said, well, if they're interested in me, I'd be open to talking to them. They were. And I went through the interview process.
They have a search committee.
What I do remember, and I remember, if you remember 2009, was just- Post-apocalypse. Horrible recession and California being particularly in a bad place. So I just talked to them about how I think about managing people, how I think about making sure that you use whatever assets you have maximally.
I admitted that I had never done fundraising, but I had done a lot of work with Wall Street and I could talk.
And I did a massive amount of investor relations because Art didn't like traveling or talking, so.
Mine too. No, we were a good partnership. But I also said, look, if you think about running the faculty meeting, I'm probably not your guy, but that's what the provost does. I think they really thought they wanted somebody who could work on the business aspects of the campus. We needed to finish Mission Bay.
Yeah, yeah. And you manage the hospital CEO and it's a big hospital system. There's no undergrads at UCSF. So that was what they were looking for. And I thought, well, why not?
I was really concerned. I was really concerned about it. And I also realized because some of the faculty were pretty negative when I first started.
Showing 221–240 of 362 · page 12 of 19
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