The Data Behind Cancer Research: Q&A with Alicia Zhou

Alicia Zhou
CEO
Cancer Research Institute

As the new CEO of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI), Alicia Zhou has a clear vision for the organization’s future. She spoke with Pharmaceutical Executive about her new role and how she plans to grow the CRI.

Pharmaceutical Executive: What was it about the CRI that made you decide to join?
Alicia Zhou: I am a cancer researcher by training and started in molecular biology cancer research. I did that for about 15 years and had the privilege to train in a lot of large academic institutions. I did my post-doc at UCSF, and afterwards I came west, which is where I am today. I'm based in the San Francisco Bay Area and was sure I was going to become an academic, but I took a very strange left turn. I think there’s something in the water in San Francisco that everybody tries to do something entrepreneurial at some point. I joined a startup almost 10 years ago.

Then I joined a small company of about 30 people, where I had the privilege to build the entire scientific medical affairs team. The goal of that company was to provide or improve access to germline genetic testing for cancer predisposition. Through that effort, I got to really watch and be a part of the growth of an amazing organization.

I also had the privilege to be involved in the NIH All Of Us Research Program, which is a large, one million person initiative to sequence one million genomes married with EHR records and make that available for research. I've been part of that the last five years. I’ve had a chance to sit in academia and understand what the research was like. Then I spent the last 10 years on the industry side in a startup, really understanding what the commercial side is.

That's what makes me uniquely positioned to now be in a nonprofit seat. The unique value we add to the ecosystem is that we can really help bridge and defragment the space and help fund the projects that otherwise aren't being funded because they're not being incentivized in either academia or industry. That's what was really exciting to me. Of course, CRI has an amazing legacy. It has this great scientific advisory council led by Nobel laureate Jim Allison.

PE: How would you describe your time there so far?
Zhou: It's onboarding and learning everything. The thing about CRI is that it's got these amazing programs they've been running for years and even decades. This is a well-oiled machine that already has made a lot of impact in this space. As I'm coming in, what I'm trying to ask is how do we continue to have maximize the impact that we as an organization can have. That involves examining everything that we do, getting to know everybody who's involved, and then really thinking about where the space is at. I think immunotherapy as a space is really interesting right now.

PE: What are your specific goals as CEO?
Zhou: Where the research is moving is that everybody's becoming more data driven. What I mean by that is that a lot of biological research and drug development is now being done from the basis and a foundation of looking at a large data set that's been generated and then understanding what the trends are using advanced computational methods like machine learning and AI to help us mine large data sets to be able to derive the right set of new molecules to invest in new hypotheses to be tested.

This is very much the trend that's happening across all of life sciences. This is an area where we've had some good data generation occur, but because it's such a breaking new frontier for scientific research, there hasn't yet been sort of that harmonization of what type of data do we need or how it’s generated.

How is the data harmonized? What are the data standards? So this is an area where I think it's time for immunotherapy to really lean in and to start to embrace that data driven discovery, and CRI needs to play a role in that. We are already funding a lot of training work to make sure that our post-doc fellows understand and know how to analyze these big data. We have this boot camp where we're teaching our postdocs how to code in various languages such as SQL and Python. They’re also trained to ask if there are any additional investments that need to be made and whether CRI can help bring that ecosystem together.