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Jose Baselga

Mar 26, 2025, 09:53

Sunil Verma: Four years ago, the cancer community lost one of its leaders, Jose Baselga

Sunil Verma, Global Head of Oncology, Medical at AstraZeneca’s Oncology Business Unit, shared on LinkedIn:

“Four years ago, the cancer community lost one of its fiercest leaders, Jose Baselga. His mark on the field of Oncology will always live on as will his impact on bringing transformative therapies in Breast Cancer and beyond. One of his legacies is how he mentored and built future leaders across his remarkable career.

I had the incredible honor to work with Jose through the Breast cancer academic efforts for many years before I joined AstraZeneca to work alongside him. Jose reached out in early 2019 to request for me to join AstraZeneca and lead the Breast Cancer strategy and to take the clinical leadership for our Breast cancer portfolio – in his words, we can write the textbooks of what the future of cancer care could look like.

The opportunity to work with Jose has been of my greatest highlights of my career. He had a way to drive us to incredible depths to learn from every patient, to progress our work at pace and to meaningfully address the biggest care needs. He shared the urgency to progress our portfolio because patients don’t have time, they need new therapies, and we need to meet their needs.

After Jose Baselga’s passing, I reflected a lot on his sense of urgency, in retrospect the urgency should be in all of us as we don’t know how much time we all have left in making a difference and progressing our efforts.

We all miss Jose dearly, his legacy and his impact will live on by the medicines he brought forward and through many of us who continue to live his lessons on a daily basis and will continue on the path forward to make a greater difference for people with Cancer.”