St. Jude CEO talks biggest hurdles in new plan
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s ambitious $11.5 billion plan will require many new employees to advance research in childhood catastrophic diseases, a recruiting task CEO Dr. James Downing said would be a top challenge in accomplishing its goals.
“We need to recruit more,” Downing said in an interview about the six-year plan, announced April 27. “We’re going to be recruiting 70 new faculty, and we need to recruit the best individuals from across the world to come and work on this campus.”
The new recruits will help the Memphis institution follow through on its plan to accelerate research and treatment. Beyond the 70 faculty positions, other new employees will be working in research, support, clinical and international positions — St. Jude says it will add 1,400 new employees in all.
St. Jude will also be raising employee compensation. In its strategic plan, St. Jude said it will invest $67 million to “improve competitiveness” of its salaries versus East and West Coast institutions.
Teaching the next generation
To keep the talent pipeline flowing, St. Jude is developing programs for area high school and college students to pique their interest in science and other fields.
“We consider ourselves an A-plus research organization sitting here in Memphis,” Downing said. “So, is there something we can do to stimulate those that live within our community about a career in science and medicine?”
St. Jude will create a summer science fellowship program for high school seniors and college students in the Mid-south as part of the strategic plan. The 8- to 12-week paid fellowship will accept about 30 students, per the plan. These students will intern in laboratory, clinical, population science or data science programs, it added.
St. Jude will also develop an educational platform for high school students on the St. Jude Cloud. The St. Jude Cloud houses the largest public repository of pediatric cancer genome data.
“The aim is to inspire high school students and their teachers to learn about the emerging genomic medicine field,” St. Jude’s strategic plan says. “Through this experience, we hope some students will consider pursuing careers in biomedical sciences.”
Downing said the hope is for some of the students these programs touch to one day work at St. Jude. The strategic plan noted that there is an “extremely small number” of underrepresented minorities entering the areas of science and medicine St. Jude focuses on.
Building up pediatric neurology
St. Jude is directing $3 billion toward pediatric cancer as part of the strategic plan, an area the institution has no shortage of experience in. There are still a range of high-risk cancers “where progress hasn’t been that good,” Downing said.
But the plan also calls for St. Jude to advance cures for children with neurological diseases. Until recently, patients with these diseases “might get a diagnosis, but nothing could be done,” Downing said.
To help improve that outlook, St. Jude is launching the Pediatric Translational Neuroscience Initiative, a laboratory and clinical research effort that will bring a new disease focus to the Memphis institution.
Housed under this initiative will be the Center for Experimental Neurotherapeutics, which will work to advance new treatments for pediatric neurological diseases to lifelong cures.
“As with current gene therapy trials, St. Jude will cover all costs associated with treatment during the study, and patients and their families will reside in St. Jude short-term housing during evaluation and treatment,” the plan says.
Downing said the field of pediatric neurology is currently “ill-equipped” to advance at the rate needed to find out the best therapies for children with neurological diseases. St. Jude felt it could speed up the effort with the initiative, an investment of more than $60 million over the plan’s six years, Downing said.
“We have a strong foundation of research in neuroscience on this campus,” Downing said. “Our investigators have identified some of the genetic defects that result in a subset of these diseases, and efforts across the U.S. and the world have started to show how one might develop therapies that can actually change the lifelong outlook for these patients.”
Training the trainers internationally
Under Downing’s watch, St. Jude has put a spotlight on treating children with pediatric cancer outside the U.S. The St. Jude Global initiative, which launched in 2018, is working to improve health care access for children around the world who have cancer and other catastrophic diseases.
Getting health care institutions throughout the world up to St. Jude’s speed on treating these patients is easier said than done. Many low- and middle-income countries don’t have the infrastructures necessary to treat children with pediatric cancer, Downing said.
“They can’t use the therapies we use because they don’t have those infrastructures,” Downing said. “So how do we train a workforce across the globe so that children have access to care no matter where they are?”
Max Garland covers Fedex, logistics and health care for The Commercial Appeal. Reach him at max.garland@commercialappeal.com.