This Just In Radio: CancerX 2026 with Dr. John Cleveland and Xavier Avat

Speaker A: M welcome to this Justin the show

Speaker B: bringing you the latest advancements in healthcare strategy, innovation and public policy.

Speaker A: And now for the fastest voice in healthcare, here's your host, Justin Barnes.

Speaker B: Hello everyone and welcome to special edition of this Justin Radio. I'm your host Justin Barnes. Today we're broadcasting live from Tampa, Florida in the Moffitt Cancer Center. We we are graciously invited to join the Cancer X Leadership Summit and have several of their leaders joining the show to launch our new cancer innovation series. Many thanks to Dr. Kamal Jathwani and Dr. Ninish Parikh for their hospitality in making this on location series happen. This specific cancer innovation series was initially derived from a conversation last October at the health conference in Las Vegas where I became very optimistic about the strides in cancer care innovation and patient outcomes. As we're outlining these episodes, it became even more obvious why we needed to tell these encouraging, encouraging stories about innovation, survivorship and curing cancer. I hope all of you find these episodes as enlightening and encouraging as me and I expect to host a follow on series later this spring. So stay tuned for this episode. My guests are Dr. John Cleveland, center Director, Chief Scientific Officer and Executive Vice President for Moffitt Cancer center and Xavier Avat, Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer for Moffitt Cancer Center. Dr. Kuhlman, thank you very much for joining us. Uh, so from your perspective, what recent advancements in cancer innovation are you most encouraged by and why are they meaningful?

Speaker A: I think the impact of AI and deep learning and machine learning is going to have a profound effect on um, everything that we do in cancer, from some pretty basic needs to improving patient access, um, to transforming our discoveries, um, and driving them into the clinic. I think one of the low hanging fruits that I'd like to see over the next 12 months would be to use AI to streamline processes for clinical trials.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Right. So AI tools should be able to be used to identify patients who are eligible for trials, um, and by querying their data, their treatment history, their molecular data, should be able to pull from our portfolio of clinical trials what patients are, um, could be put on specific trials that are available at the institute. And that is really important because we closely monitor, um, our clinical trial portfolio on the basis of disease groups. So we have something called clinical research medical directors for each of the disease programs and their job with the disease program and the chair of that program is to develop a portfolio that makes sense for the patients that we have coming to Moffitt and to prioritize those. Um, there's also Something called a portfolio mix, where um, a viable clinical trials research enterprise, um, requires a certain type of mix of trials to generate um, revenues that will carry the business forward. Um, this is actually something that's super important and um, will allow us to put the best trials forward and activate those uh, into our system. Um, AI could also be used to improve the processes for clinical trial activation. One of the problems um, that we're having in the States right now and competing with, for example China.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: Is the amount of time it takes to put a patient on a trial and to open a trial. Um, so the best case scenario is to open these trials within 30 days. And um, with the number of processes that are in place and the kind of review that has to happen, um, it can often take 120 days. Right. And that puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Absolutely right. And it's driving early phase trials overseas.

Speaker C: Hm.

Speaker A: That really should be done here. Right. Um, and so it ends up creating a lot of work on the back end because things that are done overseas may have to be revalidated here. So I think that's something that we really could enjoy an immediate impact. So that's super important. Um, AI and machine learning also are going to drive discoveries. And my job as center director is to oversee our research operations and we're looking for that to really inform um, best pipelines and best drug developments that we should be pursuing. There's many aspects of that. So that's a tremendously exciting opportunity for a health system like Moffitt at so many levels, from research to patient access, to following um, patient outcomes and figuring out how do we um, best manage a patient to make sure that their care is at an optimum, that we follow them for adverse events. Um, using digital technologies, we should be able to monitor um, the effects of diet, sleep deprivation, etc. On um, um, patient. Ah, well being, um, we should be able to design trials that can do for example nutritional interventions to figure out what kind of foods a patient should be taking before, during and after therapy, uh, what kind of exercise programs might be meaningful for a patient during the patient journey. Um, so there's just many aspects by which you can apply digital technologies and then AI to help uh, um, a physician really improve and personalize treatment and improve the outcomes of patients across the board. You know, our need is great if we're seeing 100,000 patients a year. Right, right. Uh, you can tell that um, the need is urgent. There's 180,000 new diagnoses of cancer in Florida every Year. Right, right. So number two in the nation.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: Dr. Wu actually covered some of that. So what are you, um, currently working on that you're most passionate about, and how does that connect to improving cancer, um, rates or outcomes?

Speaker A: Well, I think Moffitt is very well known for developing innovative immunotherapies, especially cellular immunotherapies. And, um, one of the new therapies that's rolling out of Moffitt now are dendritic cell therapies. So it's like a third tier of cell therapies that's being developed. Um, and then there's very innovative other kinds of cell therapies that you can conceive. Um, there's an adaptive immune system that people understand and recognize that B cells make antibodies, T cells are there to kill cancer cells and infected cells. Um, but there's also the innate immune compartment that includes myeloid cells and macrophages. Um, those can also be engineered to create new therapies against cancer. Um, and they can be reprogrammed to reprogram the tumor microenvironment to improve the efficacy of immunotherapies. So those are super kind of innovative things that we want to do. We also want to apply, um, bioengineering tools. One of the things that Moffitt is invested in is, uh, the physical sciences and trying to apply those to cancer biology and trying to apply those to cancer treatment and prevention. So we have an integrated mathematical oncology department that applies Darwinian principles to understand how a tumor evolves and how treatment therapy evolves in a patient and when you should switch therapies and what kind of drug you should use to switch. We have a, uh, bioengineering department that's there to make new tools, new platforms to improve processes. For example, one of the things that's facing the industry right now is getting cell therapies out to, uh, oncology practice. And so how do you do that? You have to improve the processes by which we manufacture these cell therapies and make them affordable. So they're not 500 to $600,000 a shot. You drop it down to something that's more reasonable, uh, that a doctor can prescribe and give at an oncology center. So we're, we're working hard on that with the bioengineering capabilities. And then we have a machine learning AI department. Yeah. Right. So institute has invested heavily in these physical sciences, uh, to really change how we do business and to accelerate our discoveries into the clinic.

Speaker B: Love it. So our closing question here, looking at the proverbial crystal ball. What strategy, capability or shift must Moffett, um, be ready to navigate in two to three years to meaningfully, ah, accelerate progress in these areas.

Speaker A: Um, one of the things that we really have to do is work on literacy. Okay, right. Literacy of AI and applying data science to everything that we do. And so I think that's something that we really need to invest in because if your faculty and uh, leaders aren't literate in, in the state of the state. Right. Then you're not going to be able to really feel the impact like you should. So I'd say that's one thing that we really have to work on.

Speaker B: It's a great point.

Speaker A: Um, it's. And then I think it's um, giving the message again and again that Moffitt is um, part of our DNA is innovation. So if you look at our strategic plan, it's called impact and innovate. And so we embrace this idea of we have to apply new innovations to really move the needle.

Speaker D: Excellent.

Speaker B: Very insightful. Dr. Cleveland, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker A: You bet.

Speaker B: See you soon. Thank you. Appreciate your time.

Speaker A: You bet.

Speaker B: And now Xavier Abad.

Speaker D: Thank you very much, Xavier. So from your perspective, what recent advances in cancer innovation are you most encouraged by and why is it meaningful?

Speaker C: Well, so first, you know, when you think about the last, let's say 50 years, I mean there's been uh, a tremendous innovation in the, in the space of cancer, mostly on the therapeutic side. I mean we have drugs today that uh, 20, 30 years ago we would not even have thought were, uh, possible, uh, to use with patients. Going from small molecules, which was pretty much the uh, only game in town with radio, uh, radiation therapy. Obviously that is still a very important um, modality to the advances of uh, large molecules, biologics. I lived through that in the early 2000 with Genentech and Amgen and a few others that brought a lot of additional um, tools to the armamentarium. But what is most exciting today is our ability to combine the toolkit, what I call the toolkit, all these, uh, therapeutics and modalities that are available with our clinical expertise and the computing power that we have today. And I believe that we are that close to literally engineering the chronicity of cancer, uh, transforming or changing that from a death sentence to uh, a disease that you manage over time. Playing with a toolkit, all that powered by uh, AI and data.

Speaker D: That's exactly where this conversation came from. Last, uh, fall I met up with Kamal, uh, and Nanesh, um, and specifically we Were talking about the innovations. They were actually speaking on stage about the innovations. And what we're doing, we're achieving not only here at moft, but also in other institutions and organizations around the country and the world. And I got very encouraged about, uh, um, our advancements, but also when you

Speaker B: start to learn AI, now we're making

Speaker D: advances at a much greater rate. And that's actually. Then that's a conversation where cancer X came in. But we'll get to cancer X here in a moment. What are you personally working on that you're most passionate about, and how does it move towards curing cancer or outcomes?

Speaker C: Well, there are a lot of things that I'm passionate about and excited about, uh, and that we're developing at Moffitt and also across, uh, other academic centers and the industry that is obviously playing a big role in that, uh, um, as well. But as much as we can better, uh, use if you want, the tool that we have today to treat cancer, there's still a very big gap in the access to um, uh, this information, maybe the tools, uh, the different therapeutics. But before even the therapeutics, the information, um, 80% of patients are treated at community centers. Uh, an average oncologist in a community Centers, uh, sees 60 to 80 patients a day. Guidelines change 240 times a year on average. Um, knowledge is exploding. When you're a community oncologist, you mean. Well, you want to do what's best for your patients. You can not keep up, uh, with the knowledge and all the publications, all the clinical trials. So, um, this is the second aspect maybe of what's exciting about data, uh, digital and AI. It's uh, allowing us today to bring this knowledge, uh, uh, in a dematerialized way if you want to every oncologist across the country or even across the world. And so at Mofitt, we've spent uh, the last couple of years in fact building such digital platform. Um, one of them is called Clear onct. I call that, uh, the platform that packages all the MOFIT expertise so that we can bring it to oncologists wherever they are across the world. And there is no reason why a patient in the middle of Kansas shouldn't be able to benefit from what we've learned here at Moffitt. Uh, that's a promise of, uh, these platforms. And that's very exciting. We are literally launching this platform. The other one is OncoBrain, which is bringing a virtual oncologist to augment a, uh, community oncologist again, wherever this community oncologist uh, is uh, working. Um, um. We are at this exciting stage where we have a product, uh, we've tested it obviously with mofit. It's very important to uh, uh, partner internally with our um, ah faculty and physicians to validate these solutions. Uh, we are also now validating or we have validated it with external institutions as well so that we can uh, calibrate and we are literally at the stage where now we are negotiating commercial contracts with community systems for them to onboard these platforms, uh, and bring in a way the MOFIT experience to their patients again wherever they are throughout the country. So that's exciting. And uh, when you get back to these 80% of patients who uh, are cancer patients who are treated within these community settings, I think we have an opportunity to have an amazing impact on outcomes and to really um, level off a little bit uh, and arise may be part of the differences that you see um, in clinical outcomes between an academic center like Moffitt and a community center that again means well, wants to do the right thing but is just not equipped to uh, uh, follow up with uh, the pace of innovation.

Speaker D: Very well said. And that supports a lot of what Dr. Jetwani talked about in the show earlier. I guess taking a moment. What are you most encouraged by? How many have you been in cancer and working at Moffitt and cancer research and so forth?

Speaker C: Well, on and off because I was at Genentech as I mentioned, uh, but I've been at Moffitt, uh almost uh three years now, two and a half years.

Speaker D: What's the most encouraging thing that you've seen, you know, for patients? I mean a lot of my shows focus mainly m on thought leadership. A lot of healthcare executives and leaders listen to my show in that regard. But also patients. We're all patients in our own regard, in our own right, um, but also the general population. What's the most encouraging thing that you've seen in your time here at Moffitt or in your time in the industry around for patients and how we're making advances in cancer cancer care?

Speaker C: Well, maybe I'll uh, uh, touch on Conserx here because uh, it's an extension of what I'm seeing uh at Mofit as well. Um, um. Maybe for too long, and it's not perfect yet, but for too long we've had um, siloed approaches uh within institutions and then amongst institutions, between industry and uh, institutions like mofid, between payers and providers. And so it's been a very um, siloed uh. View of the world and kind uh of concert doesn't have any uh parties, doesn't have any sites. I mean it's touching Obviously everybody uh uh across uh every lines of trade or uh, wherever you live again or uh, whatever um your um uh um M Organization is doing and um what I um really see with Conserx is bringing together uh industry partners, providers like Moffitt and other academic centers, uh uh large healthcare provider system, not just the academic uh systems uh investors. We have venture capital, uh part of Kansura. It's very, very uh material and critical for startup companies. We have government also. They are not here today because of the shutdown but they were going to be with us. Uh we have payers also who um, uh I will say you know have often been painted as uh, as a bad guy uh around the table. But payers uh want to do the right thing as well. You know they just don't want to pay for, for protocols that are 10 years old. You know that's just uh. So when you bring everybody around the table and everybody uh share their, their perspective and patient of course patient advocacy as you've seen this this morning when you bring everybody around the table and um, you start breaking the silos, you understand where the others are coming from and you look at solutions uh that are going to be uh more impactful across the patient journey or like we discussed this morning across the startup journey. Startup companies who are innovating are going through a lot of steps and when they do it again in a vacuum, uh one stakeholder at a time, that's not ah as productive or effective as if they start understanding the ecosystem. So consterx I would uh say uh the power of cancer X is the power of the ecosystem that it's creating.

Speaker D: Excellent. I love it. So I mean following on cancer X, what are your goals for cancer X and what do you hope to achieve in 2026? I know we're still early on and you just covered a little bit of it.

Speaker C: What do you thought I said Cancer X vision is to admission is to contribute to uh uh reducing um uh cancer mortality. There is the cancer X uh uh goal, the moonshot goal of cancer cutting cancer uh mortality by 50% by 2047. Um, I don't want to put numbers. The team is working on that. I've been very pushy at trying to get some specific numbers because I think it's important but I believe we can uh contribute maybe 20 to 30% uh through CancerX by tapping the power of data uh Digital assets and AI today. And so that's kind of the vision for Concerx. And of course we have now a strategic roadmap that is still emerging where we need to refine it a little bit. But a lot of the activities we're doing uh we can tie that directly to um reducing uh cancer mortality. Uh one uh aspect of that is accelerating the onboarding of these innovative solution that we see with these uh startup companies uh within healthcare systems uh like Mofield. It's uh too fragmented right now, uh it's too slow uh and yet the innovative power is here. I mean the talent is here. Uh so uh cancerx has a big role to play to help standardize, put together playbooks, uh and simplify the onboarding of these uh innovative solutions.

Speaker D: I love it. One last question or final minute or so. Looking at the proverbial crystal ball. What strategy, capability or shift must Cancer X grid navigate in two, three years from now to continue to make meaningful progress?

Speaker C: So I'm a big believer in scaling up efforts. Uh if you help a patient that's great but that's only good for this single patient. And so uh, um CancerX uh has a unique opportunity to uh again bring these different solutions uh that we shape out or help uh with uh a program to uh uh come uh to bear at scale. Uh it's not sufficient to uh onboard a uh small solution here and there uh within Systems and take 15, 18 months each time to do that. We're not going to move the needle if uh we do that. So if I were to describe where Cancer X biggest impact will uh be uh I would say ah it would be in the simplification and standardization of bringing innovation at scale. Uh another uh element though that um um will be maybe a little um um um more challenging to tackle especially in the short term is the level of fragmentation. Um I see a lot of point solutions uh out there so a lot of great ideas Again uh innovators bringing amazing uh technologies, applications, platforms but usually to answer a very narrow uh problem and uh, we're going to need to uh, start seeing a little more um um um uh uh platforms or solution that uh stitch together if you want multiple applications so that we can solve maybe a line of service issue instead of just one element of this line of service that's part of the scalability.

Speaker D: Excellent. I love it. Xavier, thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker C: Thank you, thank you.

Speaker B: Well that's a wrap from Tampa in the Moffitt Cancer center in cancerx. Thank you all for listening. And I certainly want to offer a note of gratitude to the leaders of Cancer X Moffitt Cancer Center, Advocate Health, Fred Hutch, Amazon Web Services, rush, and other leading cancer centers, life science organizations and technology. Together, these voices provide a comprehensive view of how collaboration between providers, researchers and industry is shaping the next decade of oncology innovation. And a special note of thanks to Jake Reed, my Head of Media. Jake did a phenomenal job managing this remote podcast and also keeping all of us on track. And as always, a big thank you to all my listeners. We're grateful for you and you make us better with every broadcast. And please stay tuned in weekdays as we broadcast at 2:30pm Eastern, 11:30am Pacific. As always, you can find me at LinkedIn @justintbarns or track me on Twitter at hntadvisor and use the hashtag thisjustinradio so you respond to your comments from the show. If you miss any part of this broadcast, all of my this Justin radio shows are posted on Amazon Music, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, SoundCloudsPreaker, and the TuneIn platforms. And also check out the content we published in, uh, the New Thought leadership page@justinbarnes.com thanks everyone. Have a great rest of your day.

Speaker A: Sam m.