Phyllis Ferrell Named Chief Impact Officer for StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot
Shortly after Phyllis Ferrell, DrPH, MBA, transferred from a marketing and sales role at Lilly to leading their Alzheimer’s division, her father was diagnosed with the devastating disease. She threw herself into the work and eventually became a leading voice in Alzheimer’s research and drug development. She’s served as a strategic advisor to multiple high-profile Alzheimer’s organizations, and now she’s marshaling her experience to lead StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot. We caught up with her to get a better understanding of where she sees this initiative going and why this is such a unique moment in time for Alzheimer’s innovation.
StartUp Health: Before becoming the Chief Impact Officer of StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot you worked at Eli Lilly for 30 years. Tell us a bit about your career.
Phyllis Ferrell, DrPH, MBA: The first half of my career at Lilly was on the commercial side, mostly looking at getting new drugs launched and making sure that whatever we were doing was going to meet the needs of patients. But 13 years ago, the company tapped me to take responsibility for leading our late-stage drug development and diagnostic development for Alzheimer’s disease, which were both therapeutics and imaging agents at the time. It was a real change in my career, a pivot from commercial and marketing and selling to really thinking about how we were going to get these drugs through the development pathway. But the really interesting part of this story is that about six months after I was asked to take on that role, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. So I spent the second half of my career at Lilly really fighting both a personal and a professional journey.
StartUp Health: How did the experience with your father shape your perspective on the disease and your work?
Ferrell: It meant the job was not a job. You got up every day knowing that the fight was for your own family. But I think what really it shaped for me, and one of the reasons why I’m so excited about StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot is that there were so many things broken outside of the science. I recall someone coming and telling me we enrolled a study as fast as it’s ever been enrolled — a thousand patients in the US in just 18 months. It took us 18 months to find a thousand people with Alzheimer’s disease in the United States? I realized we were really sitting on top of a very broken healthcare system where people with Alzheimer’s disease were in hiding. They weren’t talking to their doctors, they weren’t getting diagnosed in a timely or an accurate way, and as a result, they weren’t ever being offered a clinical trial. But then of course, with a commercial background, a light bulb went on and said, gosh, what’s going to happen when we actually are successful in the science, which we’re starting to be right now, and the people who really need these drugs aren’t going to be able to get them because the whole ecosystem wasn’t working together.
StartUp Health: You’re coming from this institutional understanding of bringing drugs to market, and now you are liaising with a community of startups. What do you see as something that’s really essential and important about working with people in those early stages of innovation?
Ferrell: What I love about startups and founders is that they see a need, they see an opportunity, and they jump in with both feet. The way I looked at it is, we’re now successful with these first therapies coming out of the regulatory process. We need to go make sure that all these startups, all this ecosystem around these therapeutics are available too. And that could be startups that support caregivers and families. It could be startups that help support care workers or B2B in a health system situation. It could be new diagnostics, new therapeutics. So for me, it’s really exciting to be around people who said, I have an idea. I’m willing to jump in. I’m going to be a part of this battle. And that’s really what it’s going to take. There’s not one sector that can do this by themselves.
StartUp Health: Is the breadth of innovation something that’s important to you?
Ferrell: Well, it’s one of the reasons that I decided to make the change and leave a very successful and long career in pharmaceuticals. Any big pharmaceutical company will agree the drug is not the silver bullet. There has to be an ecosystem around these therapeutics. You see it in diabetes and oncology, but we haven’t had it in Alzheimer’s disease. People have been sitting alone, undiagnosed, hiding, losing their social networks. We can do better than this. And so I think that breadth of innovation is actually the only thing that’s going to make us successful.
StartUp Health: With the Alzheimer’s Moonshot we’re creating a platform for a new kind of collaboration. Talk to me about why the sharing of data, the sharing of information is important in Alzheimer’s in particular.
Ferrell: It’s not just sharing the data of the studies, but it’s sharing what you learned about doing the clinical research. It’s sharing what you learned about physician behaviors and insights. When you talk about putting together a community of champions, it’s going to be people who raise their hand and say, I want to participate in something that’s bigger than myself. So now we’ve got a collective group of people in this moonshot that are sharing with each other how that change is happening, what they’re learning as they’re interfacing. And I think we’re going to actually see some organic collaboration come between those moonshot champions. So I’m really excited to increase the number of people that decide to raise their hand, take the pledge and say they want to be part of this because that’s really how we’re going to make a big difference in this disease.
StartUp Health: I know we’re just in the early days of the Alzheimer’s Moonshot, but have you received any feedback?
Ferrell: I’ve been in this community now for 15 years. And the thing about the Alzheimer’s community, it’s really tight knit. When they saw the moonshot announcement there was tons of inbounds. How can I help? How can I be involved? What can we do? This is great. We’ve needed this for a long time. And that’s really validating and reinforcing. I know we have a hard road ahead of us, but I do know it makes it a lot easier if you’re not doing it alone.
StartUp Health: Talk to us about the caregiver side of Alzheimer’s. Obviously it’s important to talk about drug development but there are innovations that can lift up those who provide care as well.
Ferrell: We often say that in Alzheimer’s disease, you don’t just have a patient, it affects the whole family. So I’m excited for families to not have to do it alone anymore. I’m especially excited for women. This disease disproportionately impacts women. It disproportionately impacts women as patients, both because we live longer, but also for some other reasons that we haven’t completely understood yet. Caregivers are four to one more likely to be a woman. And paid caregivers, like CNAs — who are angels on earth — are more likely to be women. We see women dropping out of the workforce because they’re honored to take care of their family members, but that shouldn’t be the way things have to be. So I’m excited for caregivers to have more support. I’m excited for families to be able to talk about this disease. I’m excited for neighbors and communities to say, I know how to help now.
StartUp Health: The moonshot is supported by two initial “Health Moonshot Champions,” — ADDF and Gates Ventures. What does it mean just for the energy of an operation like this to have those two particular supporters?
Ferrell: We were thrilled when Gates Ventures and the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation decided to come in and really catalyze this. I have to tell you though, I wasn’t surprised. These two organizations have been funding Alzheimer’s research even before it was sexy to do so.
StartUp Health: Is there a particular innovation that you’re looking for or a type of company that you would love to see apply to the Alzheimer’s Moonshot?
Ferrell: There isn’t one single innovation we are looking for. In terms of what kind of culture, what kind of founder, what kind of company we want, I want one that’s gonna roll up their sleeves and say, I want to be part of something bigger. I want to come in and say that I’m going to share, collaborate, help pick up other founders. This is a hard and emotional thing to do. So how do you pick each other up? How do you keep each other going?
StartUp Health: What I’m hearing from you is a message of hope for folks who have been told for decades that there’s really nothing that you can do about Alzheimer’s Disease.
Ferrell: If you looked in the lay press, all you’d hear was failure after failure in Alzheimer’s drug discovery. But what people don’t realize is negative studies to scientists are not failures. The only failure is when you don’t learn. And so these scientists were building on each one of those negative studies and increasing exponentially our understanding of the underlying pathology and biology of this disease. Now we know how to target some of the underlying pathology, and we know how to study the drugs. We used to not be able to see the pathology in the brain until someone had passed away. We now know that pathology starts 10 to 20 years before symptoms. We know that these therapies are going to work better the earlier they are used. When I think of the inflection point, the science is coming, the biology is moving. The fact now that we have successes means we have investment coming in. People who were kind of gun shy and holding back are now jumping in. And we’ve learned so much over the last decade that now we at least have some of the first steps. Is it the end? Heavens no. But gosh, it’s the beginning of the end. And that’s a really exciting thing for someone like me who’s had this disease impact my own family.
I don’t think there’s a better time to be coming into this field. Now, do you have to have thick skin? Do you have to be resilient? Do you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and get in the trenches and work through some tough details? Absolutely. But there’s never been a better time to be part of an Alzheimer’s Moonshot and Alzheimer’s research or startup community than right now, because we’re at the beginning of something really, really fun and special.
StartUp Health: What are you looking forward to most in 2024?
Ferrell: I’m looking forward to some uptake in these therapeutics, because I think it’s going to drive health systems, providers, practitioners, families, to realize that there is something there for them. And I think that in turn is going to fall right back to the funding for these startups. When we finish 2024, I really think this world’s going to look a lot different for Alzheimer’s patients than it did in December of 2023. And that’s something that’s really exciting for me. I didn’t make it in time for my daddy. We lost him in 2017. I promised him we wouldn’t give up, but I’ll tell you what, we’re going to make it for somebody else’s daddy and we’re sure as heck going to make it for my kids.
Learn more about StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot at startuphealth.com/alzheimers
Watch this interview on StartUp Health TV
Listen to this interview on the StartUp Health NOW Podcast
Call for Alzheimer’s Innovation
Are you an academic founder, founder, startup, or research team focused on Alzheimer’s innovation who would like to join the Alzheimer’s Moonshot? Learn more and apply for an Alzheimer’s Moonshot Fellowship.
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