(Disclaimer: I am an employee of BMS. The opinions expressed here are my own.)
Do you ever wonder what leadership skills are required to advance an idea from concept to the precipice of regulatory approval? In this guest blog, Dr. Kristen Hege, senior vice president of Early Clinical Development, Hematology/Oncology & Cell Therapy at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), describes a harrowing tale hiking in the Sierra Mountains and what it taught her about leadership.
For background, Kristen has been working on cell therapies for more than two decades (link to BMS profile here, Nature Medicine interview here). As a post-doc and, eventually, head of clinical development at a now defunct Bay Area biotech company in the 1990’s, she did research on genetically engineered T cells and hematopoietic stem cells to redirect the immune system to specifically target and kill cancer and HIV-infected cells. More recently, Kristen was part of a team who published a pivotal study of a BCMA CAR-T therapy, ide-cel (or bb2121) in patients with relapsed and refractory myeloma (link to NEJM article here).
But here you will see another side of Kristen, who is widely revered among her biopharma peers as an adventurer par excellence.…