How is McKinsey helping cancer patients?

The McKinsey Cancer Center (MCKCC) combines the Firm’s cancer knowledge with client service, supporting pharmaceutical companies, health systems, payors, and providers to positively impact the lives of cancer patients.

How do they do it? We sat down with McKinsey partner Dr. Björn Albrecht, who heads the Center, to talk about how teams work with clients, and how that work translates into tangible improvements in the lives of cancer patients.

What is the McKinsey Cancer Center, and how did it start?

The McKinsey Cancer Center started in 2008 as a small group of consultants with a background in oncology. At the time, it was called the Oncology Standing Therapeutic Area Team, or STAT for short. It started as a reactive group to support teams.

The reason we founded those STATs, in addition to our areas of specialization in pharma and health care, is that we felt we also needed to have a specialization along therapeutic areas such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, or oncology. Initially, there were fewer than 10 of us in the Oncology STAT. We have now grown from that small reactive STAT to a group of about 40 core practitioners organized in regional hubs: U.S. East Coast, U.S. West Coast, Europe, China, and Japan, each led by a dedicated partner.

How do you serve clients?

Now, we proactively help CSTs develop clients and shape the client development agenda. We understand what they need, and tailor our knowledge building based on that. We're systematic and structured about collating knowledge, and have an advisory board of respected names in the field of oncology [see brochure]. Each year, we also conduct a satellite symposium at the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Congress, which is a major annual event in Chicago where clinical data from industry-sponsored clinical trials is presented. We’ve held this symposium there for the past ten years, bringing together more than 100 clients each time.

We are pulled in to existing engagements and we also initiate our own, both through our core clients and through new clients. Some examples of our work include building a multibillion-dollar cancer organization from scratch and working with five health systems around the globe to improve colorectal cancer care, saving 400 lives annually within those systems – a mortality reduction of 10 percent.

In addition, in 2017 we began working with former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on his nonprofit organization, the Biden Cancer Initiative, and we are official members of the Advisory Committee and Board of Directors.

*Joe Biden with Björn Albrecht, who leads the McKinsey Cancer Center*

How did that come about?

Through Dominic Barton. He reached out to a colleague, Kurt Grote, who then called me as head of the MCKCC. In January 2016, President Obama had tasked Vice President Biden with the Cancer Moonshot – an initiative funded with $1.8 billion to create a decade's worth of progress in cancer research and prevention, but within five years. With the change of the administration, Vice President Biden wanted help in synthesizing and structuring the recommendations that had been gathered in the first few months and in charting out a path through which he could continue this mission through the Biden Cancer Initiative.

Do the consultants that are part of the MCKCC come from a particular background?

It’s people who have a passion for oncology – the majority of them have a life science background. For example, I hold a Ph.D. in molecular oncology, and we also have people with M.D., M.S., and MPH degrees, although we do have MBAs in our group as well.

On the analytics side, we have dedicated knowledge and analytics experts who do biostatistics and advanced analytics modeling. With that group, and through some of the work we do with clients, we have built not only a set of proprietary databases, but also analytics tools that help us do a number of different things – from analyzing patients' journeys to understanding a response to medicine in a real-world setting.

You worked on an engagement where pharma partnered with health systems. Can you talk about what benefits came out of that?

It's basically about creating value in health care. We have developed an approach to estimate the value of oncology treatments for the system, based on creating a better understanding of how a certain cancer is being treated during the patient's entire journey – from preventive measures to surgical interventions to medication.

This way you understand what the outcome benefits of a medication are vis-à-vis other interventions along the treatment pathway. We've done this with health systems across the globe and it's been incredibly insightful.

It is also beneficial for pharmaceutical companies to understand the intervention at which their drug comes into this pathway and what impact it has in terms of saving or extending lives. Maybe side effects can be avoided, or that patients have to go back to the hospital for additional treatment. So it's equally beneficial for drug companies to have this insight.

Having worked so closely with oncology your whole career, what do you find most personally satisfying about leading the McKinsey Cancer Center?

It's the patient impact – everything translates to patient impact. Identifying a new molecular target that you could potentially develop a drug for; developing a drug more efficiently and getting to registration quickly; launching a drug more efficiently and getting it reimbursed so that as many patients as possible can access it and be treated with it. All of it comes back to the patient.

That is what inspires me so much with the work that I do with Vice President Biden, because that's the "big policy stuff”. It might be slower, but if it drives change, the change is fundamental. It's probably something that goes back to when I was a kid and my dad was a physician. I decided to go into science, because I wanted to understand the actual root causes of a disease, rather than treating the symptoms. But the desire to help and have an impact on the patient level never went away.

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Read more about the McKinsey Cancer Center in this 'New at McKinsey' blog post.

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