Dr. Sujuan Ba’s Journey in Global Cancer Research and Precision Medicine | OncoInfluencers

Jemma Arakelyan: Hello everyone, welcome to Onco Influencers on OncoDaily. My name is Jemma Arakelyan, and I’ll be your host today. We have a very special guest, Dr. Sujan Ba. Hello Dr. Ba.

Hello, how are you? We have a pleasure having you today.

Sujuan Ba: Thanks. Fine, how are you?

Jemma Arakelyan: Very good. It’s my honor to be here. So, Dr. Ba is the president and CEO of the National Foundation for Cancer Research and the founder and CEO of the Asian Fund for Cancer Research. She’s a co-founder and a founding board member of the Global Coalition for Adaptive Research and CEO and co-founder of the AIMHI Accelerator Fund.

She has a long list of achievements about which I hope we will learn more today from Dr. Ba herself. So, Dr. Ba, could you please tell us more about your journey and what led you to your current roles?

Sujuan Ba: Yes, wonderful. I love talking with the young generation of scientists and leaders. I was trained as a chemist, and I came to the United States in 1986 to pursue my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.

And back then, my knowledge about the world, about the United States is very, very minimal. So, you can imagine the obstacles that I had to overcome in terms of language shock, cultural shock, financial shock, and homesick, all kinds of things. But America is a land of opportunities.

So, I had great friends and great mentors at the University of Pennsylvania. And after I got my PhD, I realized what I really wanted to do, which is very important. Just don’t follow the trend.

Back then, all my contemporaries, they all wanted to pursue the postdoc track and get academic careers. And very early on, I realized I really liked to work with people. I had a variety of projects and have a very wide interest.

And I like to see my research and my interests get applied to the real society, real world. And that’s why I choose to pursue a career in the industry. So, I joined a large chemical company, Arco Chemical Company, after I graduated from Penn.

And from there, I got a tremendous amount of mentoring and training and opportunities. And I was given the opportunity to really learn all the industries, all the sectors at the Arco Chemical Company. And from there, I realized now I really wanted to do the specialty chemical work industry instead of the commodity, very old, large scale of chemical products, chemical industry.

I wanted to do something really important for people’s life and life and death. So, I choose to pursue a career closer to pharmaceutical industry. So, I joined a consulting firm.

And I was directing a division that works with chemical specialties, drug intermediaries, and fine chemicals. I really support, supply the drug pharmaceutical companies. And I have specialty field for market research and business development in drug molecules.

And I did two years, got a tremendous amount of insights.

Jemma Arakelyan: Can you tell us what is your inspiration personally?

Sujuan Ba: So, I always have a view that if you do something, you really wanted to do something well, and then have an impact, have some influence. So, when I joined the National Foundation for Cancer Research, I wanted to look at these wonderful opportunities and this wonderful organization, which was already 25 years old. And with a great lineage of history, the co-founders, Dr. Alberson Doherty, the Nobel Prize winner, and also very accomplished retired entrepreneurs and retired attorneys.

And they had the vision, and which I totally bought into it right away, is they had a vision. We needed to support, provide the funding to the scientists who are willing to explore the uncharted area, the new frontier, and a new hypothesis. And usually, those research areas are not easy to get funding, because when you apply for government funding, you have to have some preliminary data in order to get the funding.

So, we took the risky, high risk, high impact approach to go about. And that was one thing I truly bought into it when I first joined. And that kind of philosophy carried me all the way for the last 26 years.

Because, you know, if you are passionate about certain things, you always look at what can I do better to move the needle? What can I do to make an impact? Where are the unmet needs?

So, from the research, right, we figured out very early on that we not only needed to provide research funding to the individual scientists, we as an organization will have to distinguish ourselves from the rest of other charities, other organizations, by really focusing on facilitating, supporting, and building the international collaboration. And I consider myself the citizen of the world. So, I felt it’s very important to have a, you know, very focused approach about, and a dedicated effort about building the international collaboration.

So, from that, NFCR has been consistently pushing this direction. And that’s how we realized back in early 2000, the Asian scientists, they desire to collaborate with the Western scientists. The Western scientists desire to collaborate with Asian scientists.

But the funding back then from Asia was very limited. And we needed to have the so-called glue funding, you know, the funding that glued the collaboration together, even though many times people have the desire to collaborate, but they have the funding, they can only do what they wanted to do on that continent. Same, the other way.

So, where can you find some funding that are specialized, like, supporting, specially supporting this global collaboration? So, that’s how I realized Hong Kong people are very generous, and Hong Kong citizens are very giving. And they are also really interested in learning new things, trying to understand the new knowledges and new frontiers.

So, that’s how I founded Asian Farm for Cancer Research. It’s been 18 years now. And so, these two organizations across the ocean really have put the efforts together and build some really internationally important platform, two programs.

For example, when China first opened up, they wanted to follow the protocol of setting up the biorepository bank, you know, the tissue bank, but very limited in knowledge along the line and very limited in resources. We actually put a think tank, a steering committee that consists of industry people, research people, clinicians, and patient advocates, and we helped build the first tissue bank in China, at Tianjin Cancer Hospital, with strong support from the hospital leadership, Dr. Shih-Han Hao, and also the Ministry of Health and Science Technology.

And that tissue bank was used as a role model for many Chinese hospitals to follow, to set up the tissue banks, the protocol, and we also undertaken and supported the global scale of gastric cancer.

And then, another platform you probably heard a lot is the GPM Agile, the adaptive global trial for brain cancer. So, we actually supported, we were the first founders that supported the build out of this very innovative revolutionary trial system. It’s a biomarker-driven, adaptive, multi-arm trial system that can really save the patient’s resources, get through the pipeline quicker, and to deal with those most deadly cancers like brain cancer, GBM.

And now, after 10 years from the first day of idea generating to a fully operational trial system by Global Coalition for Adaptive Research, and this knowledge, this system now is being applied to use for pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, those are all deadly cancers that needed new clinical trials. So, that’s where I can say that you, in order to be passionate about things, you know, and do well in your career, you have to really figure out how you can make a difference. And stay with it, don’t get discouraged.

So now, you know, I mentioned several programs. In order to make impact, and the journey of it is not easy. It’s not just the funding, you get the funding, it gets done.

No, it’s not. There’s so many obstacles, challenges, barriers to overcome, and bring people who work together with a common goal. And it takes about, you know, 8-10 years to see the real fruition.

Anything that’s worthwhile doing, it will take that long. So, don’t give up easily. That’s one advice I have for the young people.

Jemma Arakelyan: Wonderful. So, all of us, we are looking forward to BioHong Kong 2024, and I know that you are an organizing co-chair at the CITYU-AFCR Symposium on Precision Medicine and Digital Medicine. So, could you give us an overview of the symposium, and what is the main initiative, what we are going to talk about more in detail during BioHong Kong?

Sujuan Ba: Yes, yes. So, precision medicine, you know, is all about finding the right patient, the right drug, and treat patient with the right, you know, pathways. So, precision medicine right now is becoming the norm in the Western world, but it’s still at the front end of treatment in Asia.

So, we wanted to bring all the thought leaders from Western countries and have this dialogue with the Asian scientists, and then with the public, you know, to share what has been done in the U.S., for example, and what are the learnings we have, the lessons we learned, the foresight that we have, and insights for the future. And I thought it would be very good to have this dedicated precision medicine consortium. And we also realized that precision medicine now really needed to be coupled with digital and AI approach.

So, this is the first time we actually put together precision medicine and digital medicine together. So, we are hoping to promote more interactive dialogues, and inject some new thinking, and promote some collaboration. And not only that, I have a second day track, and I wanted to bring a different angle to Hong Kong is, you know, entrepreneurship in the U.S. from the scientists, from the scientific community, have been very successful.

Since the 1970s in the U.S., scientists have been very actively involved in building, you know, in translating their discoveries and building successful biotech companies. So, I had this very brilliant, famous two scientists from Harvard and from Colorado, and Dr. Raju Kucherlapati , and also Dr. Leslie Leinwand, and they both have built billion dollars biotech companies. So, I asked them to share their learning, you know, building the billion-dollar companies from their innovation, from their research, what they have learned, what insights they can share.

And so, they can share with a young generation of the scientists or entrepreneurs, and how to really go about this from research to entrepreneurship. So, I hope you will join us. It should be very exciting.

Jemma Arakelyan: Really, really looking forward to it, and you are also among the speakers. Your talk will be mainly about the NFCR?

Sujuan Ba: Yes, I’m mainly, I’m more like about introducing the concept of collaboration, you know, working together, and mainly about the goal of the organizations and the goal of the symposium. This is my third special talk within BioHongkong. When BioHongkong first launched back in 2022, I was invited by the chairman of Hong Kong Bio, Dr. Albert Yu, to organize a closed-door forum, inviting the speakers from the Western world, from Hong Kong, from China, talk about what can we do to make Hong Kong the next hop for life sciences.

So, I have a white paper after that about, you know, people talked about the advantages of Hong Kong, and then disadvantages or shortcomings of Hong Kong, what we can do to improve Hong Kong’s, you know, position or access to become the world, the next, you know, hub or hot spot for life sciences. And then last year, we have a track, also symposium. Last year is really about the innovative therapies and diagnosis going on, and this is my third track.

Jemma Arakelyan: Wonderful. So, Dr. Ba, to conclude our interview today, I want to give one last question. What are your personal hopes for the impact of AFCR and NFCR?

Sujuan Ba: Well, so, we didn’t touch the Aim High Accelerator Fund that we founded five years ago. So, what I have done the last 25 years is really about building this global network to advance, to continue to support innovative research from NFCR side and the AFCR side, but just having the innovative research not enough, and we have to do a better job to help the innovation and discoveries out of the lab, going to the bedside, right, going to the clinic.

So, my passion was about really building up an ecosystem that not only we support research, but we incubate the innovations out of lab and go into the startup and, you know, incubate those young companies, brave entrepreneurs.

And traditional VC money or pharmaceutical business deal or partnership money don’t come in until the companies have human data. You know, oftentimes, they wanted to see phase two data. You know, if you’re lucky, you know, you have phase one data that shows the signal of efficacy, and that’s the time more money will come in.

But right now, with the advancement of technology and the explosive knowledge we have, the scientific knowledge we have, there’s so many new innovative young companies, you know, basically in the valley of the death before phase one, before they can get the series A.

And my passion for the next several years is to really build an ecosystem, systematically helping the young companies, young entrepreneurs, and bring the network, utilizing the impact investment, venture philanthropy, and collective effort of giving the funding critical to those young entrepreneurs, the access to the advisory network, access to leadership, you know, guidance, and so building this ecosystem.

So I have this whole whole areas of critical areas in, you know, most high risk, high impact area. And that’s where I like to see we truly have, you know, sustainable, very productive ecosystem to help the researchers, entrepreneurs, and the goal is about getting the most innovative therapies and technologies to our patients as quick as we can.

Jemma Arakelyan: And that’s my goal. Thank you very much, Dr. Ba. I believe that this interview will serve as a true inspiration and motivation for young scientists, professionals, whoever works in the field of oncology.

Thanks for the great work that you do. And looking forward to meeting you during BioHongkong 2024. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Sujuan Ba: Yes, keep on going.