Kathy’s Latest Speaking Engagements, Writing, and Upcoming Events
Recent Publications and Articles
by Kathy Giusti and Richard G. Hamermesh Accelerating Precision Medicine – We, the authors, are not scientists or researchers and don’t operate a lab or an incubator. We are businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and system thinkers with broad experience in areas such as finance, marketing, and operations. Our mission is not to bring one specific drug to […]
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Recently, our Founder and Chief Mission Officer, Kathy Giusti, joined Maria Menounos on her podcast, Better Together with Maria Menounos. *Listen to the podcast in full*
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by Kathy Giusti and Richard G. Hamermesh Recent years have seen record numbers of drug approvals. In 2019 alone, there were incredible strides in developing treatments for notoriously-hard-to-treat diseases, including metastatic breast cancer, sickle cell disease, and bladder cancer. But despite these accomplishments, much more progress needs to be made. How can we accelerate the […]
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“Stop doing and start thinking” Kathy Giusti was 37 years old, with a toddler daughter, when her doctor said she only had three years to live. She had been diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a rare blood cancer, and was told there were no treatments available that could help her. So, she put her business […]
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23 years I never thought I’d see For many people, the end of summer is bittersweet. The days are getting shorter, the air is getting crisper, and suddenly, the airwaves (and screens) are plastered with back-to-school ads. Beachside barbecues and family vacations fade into memory as parents brace themselves for the return of early morning […]
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What must nonprofits learn from brands like Reebok, Wayfair, Peloton, Marriott and the Boston Red Sox? Pretty much everything there is to know about how to engage directly with patients. For decades, nonprofits have relied solely on providers, particularly large academic medical centers, to sign patients up to data registries. It’s not a bad approach […]
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I recently had an amazing experience at the Aspen Ideas: Health Festival, where I spoke on a panel about turning patients into advocates. Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for the subject of patient registries to come up, and I realized something: each of my fellow panelists was struggling to answer the same question that’s […]
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Kathy Giusti, who is revolutionizing the area of precision medicine as faculty co-chair of HBS Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator at Harvard Business School, describes her professional and personal mission to transform how medicines are discovered and developed.
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What happens when Intermountain Healthcare invests resources in an innovative precision medicine unit to provide life-extending, genetically targeted therapies to late-stage cancer patients? Professors Richard Hamermesh and Kathy Giusti discuss the case and its connections to their work with the Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator. Listen Here
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Advocates for disease research diving into fundraising in bid to wield more influence inside the startup ecosystem
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Each year, more than 1.7 million people in the United States hear three dreaded words: You have cancer. As common as cancer is, no one expects cancer to happen to them.
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The 21st century is the century of biology, where we’re seeing tremendous discoveries in science and medicine that are improving quality of life for people around the world. We are already seeing proof of this in oncology, where new treatments have transformed certain cancers from a death sentence to a chronic condition that can largely […]
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Kathy Giusti founded the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) and the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium (MMRC) after she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, in 1998. Twenty years later, Kathy is in complete remission.
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Oct. 4 2018 | STAT Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, has the potential to transform how we treat — or even cure — cancer and a host of other diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s.
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Kathy Giusti joins deep dive discussion on the advancement of Precision Medicine with other visionaries in the field. The panel was moderated by Dr. David B. Agus, University of Southern California and NBC News correspondent.
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When Kathy Giusti was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, at age 37, doctors told her she probably had three years to live. Now, more than 20 years later, with her disease in remission, she spends her days working to raise funds and improve research and treatments for cancer. In her down […]
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In 1996, Kathy Giusti, then a 37-year-old pharmaceutical sales exec with a new baby, was told she had a blood cancer called multiple myeloma and three years to live. She refused to act like her life was over. “I decided I was going to live like I was going to live, not like I was […]
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Currently, executive women hold only about 4.6% of CEO positions in S&P 500 companies. Research from McKinsey & Company reports that at the first critical step up to manager, women are 18% less likely to be promoted than their male peers. This gender disparity has a dramatic effect on the representation of women: if entry-level […]
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The innovative form of trial design known as a master protocol is gaining attention, particularly in oncology. “The widespread availability of next-generation genomic sequencing has opened the door to the development of precision oncology,” as experts have noted.
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The Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator aims to speed up the development and delivery of cancer therapies by improving the business processes that surround them. With billions of dollars spent on the development of precision medicine and related cancer research over the last decade, a recent partnership seeks a new way to bring these treatments to […]
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The Harvard Business School’s Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator is tackling a series of initiatives that will position patients to help drive improvements in both clinical care and clinical research.
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The best consumer brands help savvy shoppers find exactly what we need, exactly when we want it. If we buy a dress, for example, from our favorite online retailer, we’re likely prompted to purchase other items we had never thought of—a matching pair of shoes, the perfect statement necklace—that brings it all together. It may […]
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“It is well understood that achieving the full potential of precision medicine for all cancer patients depends on the sharing of patients’ genomic and molecular data and clinical information. To this end, several efforts — including the Genomic Data Commons, ORIEN, and CancerLinQ — have been established to facilitate data sharing among clinicians and researchers […]
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Why do some patients succumb to their cancer in a matter of months, while others with the same disease live for years or even decades? These disparities, we now know, can be explained by the mutated genes and other abnormalities that drive a cancer’s growth and fuel its spread. Patients can increasingly be matched to […]
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From bold investors to company builders, from research scientists to patient advocates, Kathy is recognized with nearly three dozen women and men who are driving progress in medicine.
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The world of cancer care is not moving nearly as fast as it could. Right now, in order to make new therapies,scientists need as much data as possible to identify patterns and targets, but the clinical and genetic information of cancer patients is siloed, with the vast majority of pharmaceutical companies, academic medical centers, hospitals, […]
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Kathy lays out how innovative models are overcoming challenges of data sharing in an interview with Precision Medicine World Conference April 2017
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When it comes to cancer, all knowledge is power — even when that knowledge is scary. Knowing as much as you can about cancer lets you and your health care team act decisively in devising your treatment strategy. Even more important, it lets you act specifically in selecting treatments or clinical trials that might be […]
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Lifestyles Magazine features Kathy in “Patient Power,” highlighting the data-driven model of the MMRF, and Kathy’s efforts to extend this model across all cancers.
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Kathy discusses how direct-to-consumer best practices can help cancer organizations connect directly with patients to fuel research progress.
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Organizations striving to find new ways to attack cancer have much to learn from direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies. Specifically, they can profit from DTC firms’ expertise in persuading their customers to provide and share their data. This is something many cancer patients don’t do because they are unaware of the data’s importance or their power to […]
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Location, location, location. It’s the number one rule in real estate and a common refrain sung by agents and choosy homebuyers alike. But it should also be the mantra for people with cancer
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Scientific efforts to find cures for cancer will be severely hampered if the scientific community does not change the ways in which patient data is collected, shared, and analyzed.
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Finding the perfect black dress is no small feat, but it’s gotten a whole lot easier. Instead of spending a good chunk of my Saturday morning at the mall, I can browse online or tap an app and be presented with the right dress for the right occasion..
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HBS names Kathy the first Henry and Allison McCance Family Senior Fellow of Business Administration.
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Business Insider discusses Kathy’s urgency to drive progress for Patients. A Woman who was given 3 years to live in 1996 explains how her ‘death sentence’ made her one of the world’s best leaders.
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Kathy is profiled by Adam Bryant in the New York Times: Kathy Giusti: Sharing Life Lessons from a Death Sentence
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Kathy and former Time Warner CEO, Dick Parsons, highlight the important of sharing data and how the MMRF precision medicine model is a leading model for all cancers.
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Kathy Giusti name 1 of 3 Top Disruptors in Medicine by Fortune magazine.
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Kathy Giusti: The Cancer Patient Who Became an Advocate for Precision Medicine
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On Thursday, President Obama hosted a summit at the White House on his Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), the year-old effort to treat and prevent disease based on individual differences in genetics, environment and lifestyle.
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In an interview with STAT, Kathy explains why applying a business approach to cancer research is critical.
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Precision Medicine World Conference International interviews Kathy Giusti for LinkedIn on how innovative models bring precision medicine to all patients.
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It’s a different world than when I was diagnosed in 1996 with the incurable cancer multiple myeloma. Today, thanks to advances in sequencing technologies, we have gained unprecedented insights into the genetic drivers of cancer
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In an increasingly digital age, immediacy has become the name of the game. A simple Google search gives us answers instantaneously and the cloud allows us to store and recover information at the drop of a hat. We take these for granted, but scientists and medical professionals do not have these luxuries when they are […]
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Featured in the Wall Street Journal, MMRF Co-Founders, Kathy Giusti and Karen Andrews discuss the importance of becoming active participants in the research process.
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We’ve seen how dramatically patients’ lives can change when they are matched with the right treatment at the right time in their disease course. Although this is still an exception and not the rule, we believe collaborative research approaches will make this kind of precision medicine a reality for all patients with cancers.
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Many of you have heard about Tom Brokaw’s new book A Lucky Life Interrupted. In it he writes with gratitude about his cancer journey, from the shocking moment of his devastating diagnosis to the triumph of learning his disease was in remission.
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Despite the fact that one in every two men and one in every three women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, no one ever expects it to happen to them. I surely didn’t. I was an otherwise healthy 37-year-old when I was diagnosed in 1996 with multiple myeloma, the same rare cancer Tom […]
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Every day, more and more of the nearly 15 million men, women and children who are diagnosed with cancer are taking important steps to bank their tissue, and to sequence their cancer genome as part of their cancer cure. These data are being used to match some patients to the most effective treatment possible allowing […]
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Critics may call this “needle in a haystack” discovery work much too speculative, but developing a 1 million-plus patient repository of genetic information could help researchers develop drugs and treatments for cancer and other diseases tailored to individual patients.
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Kathy Giusti #19 on List of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” Fortune, March 2014
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Kathy Giusti Named to the 2011 TIME 100 TIME Magazine
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