Iona Everson (IE): Over the course of your career, you’ve held roles across a variety of therapeutic areas. What led you to your current role as Vice President of Oncology at GSK?
Jack Harris (JH): I’ve been working in the pharma industry for 20 years and during that time I’ve worked for three different companies, all with a pretty consistent value structure and very much a patient-first mentality. I feel incredibly privileged to work in this industry and I’m proud of the impact it has on patients, healthcare providers and healthcare systems.
I started my career with MSD (known as Merck in the US) in a sales role, working in primary care therapy areas, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, focusing on how we communicate about our medicines and vaccines with our customers, and also how we get a better understanding of the day-to-day challenges of healthcare providers (HCPs) and what they really need from us as an industry, to better enable them to improve the lives of patients. I then moved into more of a marketing role and I also spent some time in business analytics.
Market research is a good way of understanding what customers need and how that translates into marketing strategy. I worked in a few different therapy areas, with a primary care focus, moving into more of a specialty area focused on infectious diseases, from antibiotics and antifungals to HIV and hepatitis C. Then I left MSD to move to Jansen.
Janssen is part of Johnson and Johnson (J&J), two companies that are both based in the US on the East Coast that are very consistent in terms of value structure. Whether it’s the George W Merck philosophy or the J&J credo, they very clearly put patients front and centre. I moved through various commercial roles at Janssen, from sales and marketing to market access in HIV and then into oncology. And that was my first real entry point into the oncology therapy area, covering both solid tumours and haematological malignancies.
During my time in Janssen, I also spent five years in an above country role as a product launch lead in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It was a fantastic role. Europe, the Middle East and Africa cover everything from established markets all the way through to emerging ones, with well-defined and established healthcare systems through to healthcare systems that are still very much in their infancy in terms of their provision for cancer care.
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