PHARMACEUTICAL
Great Advice From Great Minds:
Novartis Oncology Head: from Medicine to Management Emanuele Ostuni, currently Novartis Head of Cell and Gene Therapy in Europe, has seen patients up close since he was a boy in southern Italy. He is now living his dream job helping patients as Europe Head, Cell and Gene Therapy at Novartis Oncology. The interview, by Jill Donahue As a young boy, Emanuele’s father, a surgeon, took him to the hospital regularly. Emanuele knew all the nurses by name. He also worked in his dad’s private practice. “My dad never turned anyone away,” said Emanuele. Even on vacation, he remembers acting as nurse on their sailboat helping a fellow boater who was in trouble. He followed him on house visits and saw in his father a man who did anything necessary to help patients. This was a conundrum for the young boy. He too wanted to help patients but was wary of becoming overwhelmed by the responsibility. At Georgetown in a pre-med program, he was volunteering in the neurology department where he saw patients not progressing. He thought that maybe by going into research he could help people for whom there was currently no help. At Harvard he got a PhD in chemistry and collaborated with researchers at Harvard Medical School and MIT, developing new material surfaces and approaches to controlling single cells.
The technology was interesting and he joined a startup that would commercialize it. He loved understanding the science and soon realized he was also fascinated by taking a product to market. This was the test of whether your discoveries really made a difference. To get a grounding in business and strategy, he spent four years at McKinsey. “They had the guts,” Emanuele said, “to take people with PhDs and teach them the basics of business and send them out working with clients.” It was like getting an MBA through realworld experience. Eventually, wanting a more handson impact, he went back to Boston and became VP of Business Development at Nano Terra, another startup. While there, he started a biotech, Enumeral Biomedical Holdings, with a former colleague who became a professor at MIT. But there was still a bigger picture he wanted to see, the process from discovery through manufacturing, approval, sales and marketing.
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So he started talking to Sandoz, a generics company. Against the advice of colleagues and friends, he was convinced that it was the right business for him to join. The cycle times were fast, so he could see very quickly how products were developed and sold. He oversaw many launches globally and learned how to run branded and generic pharmaceuticals businesses as Head of Specialty and Hospital Franchises and Head of Business Unit Rx and Regional Alliance Manager. He worked in Eastern Europe, managing growth and expansion strategies in the backdrop of highly volatile markets – important skills for what was to come. DREAM COME TRUE That’s when the opportunity with CAR-T arose. It was a dream come true role for Emanuele when he joined Novartis in 2017. He had been watching the area develop from a distance and was amazed by the impact the therapies were delivering to patients. He moved
