Driving Change in Oncology: the Vision of the Chief Medical Affairs Officer of Agenus

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In a recent OncoDaily Medical Journal interview, editor-in-chief Shushan Hovsepyan spoke with Dr. Nils Eckardt, Chief Medical Affairs Officer at Agenus. With over three decades in the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Eckardt discussed the satisfaction of making a difference in cancer patients’ lives and exciting advancements in immunotherapy.

Dr. Nils Eckardt serves as Agenus’ Chief Medical Affairs Officer. He joins Agenus with more than 30 years of experience within the pharmaceutical industry and as a management consultant. Nils most recently served as Vice President, Global Academic & Strategic Partnerships (GMA ex-China) at BeiGene, where he also previously served as Vice President, Head of Medical Affairs, building a strong forward-looking medical affairs organization. His integrated medical affairs experience spans big pharma, biotech, and start-up companies. He is skilled in change management, building mutually beneficial relationships with therapeutic area experts, and commercial understanding.

Nils holds degrees in medicine (MD) and clinical pharmacology (MS). He began his career as a physician treating cancer patients at the University Hospital Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany, before leaving the clinic to work as a management consultant in the life sciences industry, where he has been working in various roles within medical affairs since 2003.

Shushan Hovsepyan is a pediatric oncologist and adjunct assistant professor at the Yerevan State Medical University. Currently, she is the Editor-in-Chief of OncoDaily Medical Journal.

She completed her clinical fellowship at the National Institute of Cancer in Milan, Italy and at the St. Anna Children’s Research Hospital in Austria Furthermore, she held a research fellowship position at the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer in Brussels, Belgium.

Dr. Hovsepyan also completed the Postgraduate Harvard Medical School’s Effective Writing for Healthcare program. She is a former co-chair of the SIOP Global Health Network Education and Training Working Group.

00:00 Introduction
00:25 Most satisfying aspects of Dr.Eckardt’s work
1:02 About immunotherapy
2:26 Challenging part of immunotherapy
3:52 The future of oncology treatment
5:00 Agenus and immunotherapy research
7:00 Dr. Eckardt’s personal jorney in oncology
9:17 Advice for young oncologists

Shushan Hovsepyan: Hello everyone, I’m Shushan Hovsepyan, a pediatric oncologist and editor-in-chief of OncoDaily Medical Journal and today it’s my pleasure to welcome Dr., Nils Eckardt Chief Medical Affairs Officer at Agenus. Welcome, Dr. Eckardt.

Nils Eckardt: Thank you.

Shushan Hovsepyan: So let’s start from the beginning. With over three decades of experience in pharmaceutical industry, what would you say has been the most satisfying aspects of your work in the industry and also specifically in oncology?

Nils Eckardt: I think the most satisfying aspect is to be able to make a difference to patients with cancer and I’ve been lucky in my career to always end up working with molecules, with drugs that had the potential to make that difference.

Shushan Hovsepyan: Well, that’s truly inspiring and moving forward to recent advancements, what oncology treatments are you most excited about and how do you see them impacting patient care?

Nils Eckardt: I think over the last decade, we have learned a lot around specifically targeting cancer cells and today we’re moving beyond that. We’re targeting the patient and helping the patient to restore the balance that exists between normal and malignant cells. So you, I, everybody is having cancer cells every day and normally our immune system will take care of them.

If a cancer cell escapes that immune surveillance, then cancer generates. So what we are trying today is through encouraging the immune system to recognize cancerous cells and thereby teaching itself to get rid of these cancer cells continuously and sustained.

Shushan Hovsepyan: What is the challenging part of that? We are working to have immunotherapies, but what is the challenging part of that working with immunotherapy and the cancer cells? How do you see and how are Genesis versus that challenges actually?

Nils Eckardt: So about 15 years ago, immuno-oncology has started and it has been a true revolution to medicine as we understand it today. However, it was restricted to patients that had tumors that were shouting loudly, we’re here. So if you imagine that you get up in the morning and it’s dark, the light bulb is broken, so you get dressed and you end up with one red sock and one black sock under your black suit, everybody sees the red sock because it just stands out and that’s the immunogenic tumor.

Nobody remembers the black sock and that is the immune silent tumor. So we have now found ways to remember the black sock and teach the immune system to recognize the black sock as a target for the immune surveillance.

Shushan Hovsepyan: Thank you for explaining that matter. I think it’s very important to understand also usually in our daily life we encounter a lot of things that can be used also in oncology as an example, as an explanation and building on that, what trends do you foresee shaping the future of oncology treatment?

Nils Eckardt: So when I was a young doctor more than 30 years ago, I was taught that once a patient has metastatic disease, there is close to nothing you can do for them. You can help them to have a reasonable quality of life for how much life is left. Today this is still true for many cancer patients, fortunately not for all of them and I hope that maybe another 10 years down the road we’ll be able to cure cancer in a lot more patients than we can do that today.

Shushan Hovsepyan: That’s very enlightening and you mentioned about, sorry, can you provide insights into recent advancements or breakthroughs in immunotherapy research and developments at Agenis?

Nil Eckardt: So Agenus is a company that’s now 30 years old and the focus of the company has always been the immune system and how to harness the immune system in the battle against cancer. Now this has been tried with vaccines, this has been tried with checkpoint inhibitors and other immune pathway targeting molecules and it’s also been addressed with cell therapies. I think where we are today and what we expect to see in the coming year or so is to bring an innovative dual checkpoint blockade to patients.

It is early so we have to be measured in how we describe it but we have, and this was what attracted me to join Agenus, we have a phase one study which is a study in patients that had prior multiple treatments.

Someone who’s got no other options is a patient that signs up for a phase one study and in those patients the combination of those two molecules has actually resulted in efficacy in nine different indications and that is, although it is small numbers, it is very powerful. It shows the strength of this approach and it shows that the concept of targeting the patient, having the patient irrespective of the tumor, is the right way to go forwards.

Shushan Hovsepyan: I see, thank you for explaining that and moving from oncology into your personal experience, how you decided to become an oncologist?

Nil Eckardt: So I think it was my fate, if you so wish, when I was a lot younger and I had to decide what profession to pick. I had an opportunity to go to university to study medicine and I had a second opportunity pretty much at the same time to join what today you would call an IT company to start developing information technology communications, these things that today are all part of our daily life. What I did is I decided to go and volunteer in a hospital for a couple of weeks and this is where I think I was first confronted consciously with cancer patients and this is where my journey started.

I decided that I wanted to study medicine. During my studies, I worked in hospitals and somehow I always was drawn towards the cancer departments, the oncology departments and way back it was really a situation that we didn’t have a lot to offer for these patients.

Many people just turned a blind eye or a cold shoulder towards these patients because it was so desperate, you didn’t really know what to tell them and I thought there is a need to make this different and even when I started my career as a doctor, we didn’t have the modern tools in oncology but still we could help people to live with their disease and have a good quality of life for whatever time was left and this was what has kept going in my life till today.

Shushan Hovsepyan: Yeah, that’s very motivational and the last question on a related note, what is your advice to young oncologists?

Nils Eckardt: I think, you know, oncology is a fascinating part of medicine and oncology is science and art at the same time but my biggest advice is that people need to be honest with themselves. Not everybody is made to be a good oncologist. There is a lot of suffering that we have to accept and endure.

We’ll have people’s fate touching us every day and that is going to be part of your life if you choose that part of medicine as your profession. You know, if you’re a gynecologist, you help bring in babies to the world every day, that is a completely different story that is joyful, that is bright. In oncology, you’re confronted with people dying and it is very hard.

So, you know, with all the ambition to, you know, make a difference and help patients and bring science forwards, it’s important to keep the balance and make sure that this is what you can endure for the rest of your life.

Shushan Hovsepyan: Yeah, thanks a lot for the advice. I think our young oncologists will take into account that and I would like to thank you for our interview. Thank you for accepting our invitation.

Nils Eckardt: Thank you for having me.

Shushan Hovsepyan: Perfect, thank you.