Amer­i­can Can­cer So­ci­ety leans on phar­ma part­ners for eq­ui­ty, pa­tient care and screen­ing col­lab­o­ra­tions

The Amer­i­can Can­cer So­ci­ety is both a young and an old or­ga­ni­za­tion, CEO Karen Knud­sen said in a re­cent in­ter­view with End­points News. Al­though found­ed more than 100 years ago, it op­er­at­ed as a fed­er­at­ed mod­el with re­gion­al sep­a­rate non-prof­it groups un­til less than a decade ago. That meant each re­gion­al group craft­ed its own strate­gies and can­cer ac­tion plans across the dif­fer­ent ge­o­gra­phies.

To­day, how­ev­er, it works with phar­ma in ways it couldn’t when it was op­er­at­ing un­der the fed­er­at­ed sys­tem, she said. In the past five months, the Amer­i­can Can­cer So­ci­ety (ACS) has an­nounced col­lab­o­ra­tions with Roche’s Genen­tech, As­traZeneca and John­son & John­son’s Janssen. While the do­na­tions are all sin­gle-dig­it mil­lion-dol­lar deals — and far from a large source of ACS fund­ing — the work is em­blem­at­ic of the new­er style of phar­ma-fund­ing re­la­tion­ships.

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