2017 Speaking Faculty

Lauren Barnes, Vice President, leads Vertex’s Managed Markets department. Her responsibilities include both strategic and tactical execution. Lauren oversees the teams that: ensure appropriate patient access for Vertex’s products; maintain trade and distribution partnerships; analyze and assess government pricing obligations; and stay abreast of evolving market access trends.

Prior to joining Vertex, Lauren spent 10 years at Avalere Health in Washington, DC where she ran the Reimbursement and Product Commercialization practice. In this role, Lauren oversaw Avalere’s launch and lifecycle management work with pharmaceutical, biotechnology, device, and diagnostic manufacturers. Lauren focused on optimizing market access for new specialty therapies, particularly those in the oncology, immunology, nephrology, and rare disease spaces. Lauren also created Avalere Health’s government price reporting team.

Immediately before her time with Avalere, Lauren was Director of the Payment and Coverage Group at Amgen, where she worked for six years. While at Amgen, Lauren held a series of leadership roles within its reimbursement and policy arenas. She led Amgen's internal payment policy and analysis team as well as Amgen's Medicaid and Medicare field teams. Lauren began her career at Amgen in its Washington, DC Government Affairs office. Immediately prior to her time with Amgen, Lauren worked for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly HCFA) where she developed Medicare drug coverage policies within the Coverage and Analysis Group.

Lauren holds a B.A. in Public Health and an M.H.S. in Health Care Policy from The Johns Hopkins University. Lauren also serves as the Secretary on the national board for the Cancer Support Community, a non-profit organization offering free psychosocial care to cancer patients.

Kelli Beyer joined the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research in November 2015. As Director of Education and Outreach, she leads the implementation of educational programming and communication initiatives designed to engage the Foundation’s network of industry representatives, physicians, investigators, and patients. Unified in our collective mission to accelerate research and improve clinical care for sarcoidosis patients, these initiatives have increased awareness for sarcoidosis, empowered patients to take an active role in their treatment plan, and provided invaluable clinical tools and collaborative opportunities to clinicians and investigators. Kelli can be credited with launching the FSR Patient Ambassador program in 2016 which boasts 45 trained volunteers who facilitate national grassroots outreach efforts on behalf of the Foundation. She also spearheads FSR’s SARConnect™ Program which connects stakeholders in our network, offering an unprecedented opportunity for collaboration between industry, academia, and research participants to advance in the sarcoidosis space.

With nearly 10 years of experience in non-profit management, Kelli offers a proven track record in program development, best practice communications and outreach, advocacy, and stakeholder engagement. Her professional career transverses large and small non-profit organizations, from the U.S. Fund for UNICEF to a small, direct-service non-profit serving families experiencing homelessness in Washington, DC. Having built numerous local and national programs, Kelli is undaunted by entrepreneurial demands or the need to adapt quickly to meet the needs of constituents. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Loyola University Chicago in Biology with concentration in Spanish Language and Literature.

Dr. Sonal Bhatia is the Vice President, Medical Affairs for Rare Disease at Pfizer. In this role, Sonal leads US and Canada Medical Affairs, including field-based Medical colleagues and is responsible for the development and execution of regional medical strategies in alignment with the Global Medical Leads and the Regional Commercial President.

Prior to her new role, Sonal was a Senior Medical Director, Team Lead at Pfizer, serving as the Global Medical Affairs Product Lead for market-leading novel anticoagulant, Eliquis®. She was responsible for all regions to ensure successful execution of the Global Medical Affairs Plan. In that role, she led data generation and communication strategy, leveraging the Real World Evidence, across multiple countries and customers as a complimentary strategy to ongoing clinical development plans.

Raquel has over ten years of experience across a variety of healthcare industry sectors in the US and Europe. Raquel is passionate about working with patients, clinicians, and payers at all stages of product development to address true unmet needs and ensure access..

Prior to joining Ovid, Raquel was Director of Global Market Access at GE Healthcare, based in London. In this role she led a global team responsible for market access and health economics for new product introductions from the company’s imaging technology portfolio across all therapy areas. At GE Healthcare, Raquel focused on demonstrating the value of innovative technology through research, customer partnerships, digital marketing, and sales support. .

Prior to GE, Raquel was a member of Medtronic’s EMEA health economics and reimbursement team, based in Switzerland. Before joining industry, she was a neuropsychology specialist at Cogstate, a cognitive science start-up, and Columbia University Medical Center where she led operations for federally funded studies that evaluated the specificity of cognitive testing to diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease among minorities. .

Raquel earned her MSc in International Health Policy and Health Economics from the London School of Economics and earned her BA in Psychology and French, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a member of the University of Pennsylvania Fund executive board.

Dr. Dehnel has been at Blue Cross since February of 2011. He is currently Medical Director for Integrated Case Management which focuses on utilization management, disease management and care management. He also serves as Chair of the Credentials Committee and is a principal representative to the Corporate Appeals Committee. He is also a primary member of the Medical Policy Committee and Pharmacy Clinical Team.

In addition to his role at Blue Cross, he is currently a Co-chair of the Legislative and Public Policy Committee of Twin Cities Medical Society. He also participates in various clinical and professional initiatives such as obesity prevention, tobacco (including e-cigarettes) reduction and advanced care directives through the Society. He is the immediate past chair of the Section on Telehealth Care of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors. Finally, he has the title of “Certified Healthcare Insurance Executive� through America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).

Carol obtained her Pharm D from St. Louis College of Pharmacy in 1992 --when the rules and roles of managed care pharmacy were beginning to explode in the US Healthcare System-- and went directly into a Managed Care Residency at a PBM. There she worked with manufacturers, client formularies and tier designs, P&T; committees, claims adjudication with soft and hard edits, physician counter-detailing, and therapeutic interchanges. Carol continued her career path in the PBM industry at Express Scripts, until moving over to the pharma industry in 1995 as a National Account Manager with Astra USA. At Astra, she covered PBMs, health plans, wholesalers, as well as large retail chains. Her work in National Accounts for pharma companies such as AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, UCB, and Talecris was her evolution into the specialty medication management arena, where Carol has had primary focus for the past 10 years. She has experience in both pharmacy and medical benefit categories within managed care and distribution, including self-injectables, infusions, buy-and-bill, all types of contracting, and inventory management. Since 2014, she was the Director of Market Access & Channel Management for Canadian-based Theratechnologies. Carol oversaw all US importation logistics, managed care access, a limited specialty network and a closed infusion network within 2 specialty channel rare-disease products, 3PL and wholesaler management, specialty distribution, all patient support services and vendor management, including copay, 501c3, data aggregation, and advocacy groups.

Sangeeta Krishnan is the Vice President for Value & Access at Bioverativ where she leads a team devoted to Global Market Access, Pricing, and Reimbursement for orphan diseases. She has worked within the Pharmaceutical Industry for over 15 years and is passionate about ensuring the payer mindset is incorporated in all activities from clinical development, launch preparation, execution, and lifecycle management to optimize long-term profitability. During her tenure, she has held positions in Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR), Pricing Strategy, Medical Affairs, and Market Access in US and ex-US markets. At Biogen, Sangeeta led the International Markets Regional Access team supporting P&R; negotiation planning and execution for the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Central/Eastern Europe, Russia, and Middle East focused on multiple sclerosis. Previous to Biogen, Sangeeta was at Baxter where she led the health economics and patient-reported outcomes strategy at the global and affiliate levels for the biosurgery and hemophilia inhibitor franchises. She has also spent time as a medical liaison in the mental health space developing close research partnerships with payers and as a senior consultant focused on evidence generation and value communications within the healthcare industry. Sangeeta has authored many publications and holds an MS in Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy from the University of Southern California and a PharmD and B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers University.

Leslie is a neuropsychologist with over 20 years of experience in clinical neuroscience academic research, pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Prior to joining Ovid, she held leadership roles in several capacities: SAGE-217 Program Team Lead (depression and movement disorders), Biogen Worldwide Medical PlegridyTM Launch Lead and Global Medical Director for aducanumab.

Leslie started her pharmaceutical career in clinical development. She has led Phase 1 through 4 clinical development programs across a wide range of CNS conditions including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer's disease. While at MGH in the Department of Psychiatry, Leslie was the Program Director for the first public health study of bipolar disorder, the Systematic Treatment Enhance Program for Bipolar Disorder (STEP-BD). Leslie holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, where she also completed her post doc in adult and pediatric epilepsy. Her research interests in CNS are guided by the vision and passion of bringing innovative treatments to patients.

Highly-accomplished Executive with significant expertise in market access, pricing and reimbursement, health economics and outcomes research, health policy and government affairs, and patient / medical advocacy, and a proven track record of delivering revenue and market share growth.

Well-versed in hiring and mentoring key talent, devising strategic plans to identify target markets, and creating / implementing marketing and product launch materials in collaboration with cross-organizational teams to drive results.

Strengths lie in utilizing influence to garner buy-in from internal / external stakeholders, initiating change, and utilizing available resources to streamline operations and increase product visibility. Reputation as an empowering leader with the ability to attract, hire, train, manage, develop, evaluate, and retain teams of achievement-oriented, top-performing direct and indirect reports with full accountability to the organization’s goals. Proactive executive with broad, deep knowledge of the changing industry landscape, and adept at incorporating a strong, analytics-based perspective to overcome complex leadership, marketing, and competitive environment challenges.

Christine McSherry founded Jett Foundation in 2001, when her son now 20-year old Jett was diagnosed with Duchenne. She has spent the past 15 years funding research and providing programs that fill an unmet need in the Duchenne community. Christine also co-founded the International Duchenne Alliance, a rapidly growing partnership of over 40 independent organizations dedicated to co-funding promising biomedical research in Duchenne, in 2009. To tackle Duchenne more aggressively, the Duchenne Alliance created a revolutionary funding tool called the Duchenne Dashboard. The Dashboard greatly enhances the funding process for scientists and foundations, and has funded nearly $15 million dollars in research to date.

After more than 15 years of steady progress in the fight against Duchenne, Christine has also become known as a fierce and educated advocate for rapid FDA approvals of safe and potentially efficacious Duchenne therapies. She has worked with the FDA, biotech companies, Congress, and Parliament of the United Kingdom to improve communication, clinical trial design, the approval processes, and transparency in drug development.

For the last four years, Christine has been advocating for the patient perspective to be considered and for flexibility to be applied by the FDA when reviewing safe and potentially effective treatments for Duchenne. In April of this year, Christine presented the Jett Foundation’s Patient Centered Outcomes report at the FDA’s meeting of the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee. She personally interviewed patients and families to gather data and testimonials for the report. At the Advisory Committee, Christine was part of a coalition who brought more than 1,000 families, patients and advocates to be there to support the fight for a cure for DMD.

Christine has been highlighted in the media for her firebrand form of patient advocacy, including the Boston Globe, Bloomberg Business Week, the Boston Business Journal, Fox News and Chronicle. She was also featured in the books Boston’s Most Inspirational Women and Darcy Olsen’s Right to Try.

Lynda Parker is the Chief Business Development and Account Management Officer at Dohmen Life Science Services. With more than 30 years of experience, she’s successfully led product commercialization and helped orphan drug manufacturers overcome the challenges faced in serving and providing ongoing support to the rare disease community.

In her role at DLSS, Parker leads the sales and account management teams for Direct-to-Patient Services to provide clients services that build lasting relationships, grow economic value, ensure compliance and improve operational excellence.

Parker has a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Lynchburg College in Virginia and attended the Aresty Executive Program at the Wharton Business School. She was also recognized as a Rising Star by the Healthcare Businesswoman’s Association and has earned countless awards for values-based leadership and sales excellence.

Tom Rice joined Amgen’s US Value & Access business unit as executive director, to lead the Cardiovascular Reimbursement, Value & Access (RAV) team in March 2016. Tom and his team are focused on the recent launches of Corlanor and Repatha.

Previously, Tom spent two years in Amgen’s Global Value, Access & Policy (GVA&P;) organization where he was responsible for conducting due diligence for in-licensing and business development activities including being the payer lead on the agreement that brought Corlanor to Amgen. Prior to that, Tom had roles leading U.S. Payer Marketing and the Medicare Account and Reimbursement team in Amgen’s U.S. Corporate Accounts/Managed Markets team.

Tom’s 25 years of industry experience includes field and hospital sales, sales analysis, sales training, segment marketing, District Sales Management and brand leadership roles at Aventis and its predecessor companies. Tom has an undergraduate degree in Marketing from UW-Milwaukee and an MBA from the University of Kansas.

He also serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Master of Science Program in Healthcare Decision Analysis at the USC School of Pharmacy.

Dr. Michael Sherman serves as Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President for Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. Dr. Sherman has been a leader in driving adoption of outcomes-based provider and pharmaceutical contracts, and is responsible for Harvard Pilgrim’s medical trend management, provider engagement strategy, medical informatics, wellness and health promotion initiatives, care and disease management services, pharmacy services, NCQA accreditation and quality and utilization management programs. He serves on the faculty of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Population Medicine, as chair of the board of managers of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, on the advisory board of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), and on the board of directors for the Personalized Medicine Coalition. Dr. Sherman also is the current chair for AHIP’s CMO Leadership Council, comprising chief medical officers from health plans throughout the United States.

Prior to joining Harvard Pilgrim, Dr. Sherman held leadership roles at Humana, UnitedHealth Group, and Thomson Medstat (now IBM Truven). He holds a B.A. and an M.S. in biomedical anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and received his M.D. from Yale and M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

Joan Siegel is a senior level pharmacy healthcare professional with 20+ years in strategic market development, business and product development, and sales and marketing both domestically and internationally. Joan’s career path has included utilization of health care and pharmacy trend to expand and penetrate new and current markets, development of enterprise value proposition and branding; and design and implementation of infrastructures for both in-house and field based organizations. Joan has successfully accomplished these activities with pharmaceutical manufacturers; health plans, pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) and specialty pharmacies. Joan’s P&L; responsibility has included publicly and privately held organizations.

Joan currently works for CSL Behring in the role of Corporate Accounts-Managed Markets. In this role Joan has responsibility for designated payor and specialty pharmacy channel accounts to increase product and service portfolio penetration and expanded enterprise relationships and growth.

Joan was previously in a consulting role working with specialty pharmacies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and healthcare marketing organizations to develop, implement and help manage strategic plans for distribution and reimbursement of new and current products and services in the specialty market space.

Prior to this function Joan was Vice President of Contracting at A-Med Health Care. In this role Joan led successful deep market penetration and expansion for A-Med products and services through the development and growth of manufacturer, payor (plan and employer) clinical and data driven fee for service partnerships. Joan also led the strategy and contracting efforts for wholesaler and group purchasing opportunities to maximize program outcomes and profit. Within her tenure at A-Med Health Care Joan successfully developed and executed contracts and partnerships to bring both high dollar revenue opportunity and positive brand name recognition to the organization from a national and local level in addition to building the infrastructure for intake and management of all business contracts.

Prior to this Joan was Vice President, Manufacturer Services and Product Development for Aetna Specialty Pharmacy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Aetna, the nation’s third largest health plan. In this position Joan led a national manufacturer relations and a clinical program team to gain access and provide end user availability to all defined specialty medications including limited distribution medications either currently on the market or in pipeline.

Joan also had responsibility to create, direct and implement an infrastructure to support all requirements, both FDA and manufacturer driven to appropriately dispense, track, report and manage these products at the Aetna Specialty Pharmacy. This position included development and design of a variety of study models, including, outcomes; quality of life; phase four; retrospective and prospective. Joan worked directly with both the Pharmacy Benefit Management (PBM) team and the health plan Clinical and Business teams to develop and implement payer programs to support appropriate channel use, management and uptake of specialty medications across the enterprise.

Joan also held the positions of Director of Marketing and Director of Trade Development for Priority Healthcare Corporation, a specialty pharmacy services and distribution company. In these functions Joan had responsibility for all aspects of Priority Healthcare marketing, trade relations and corporate manufacturer and payor programming activities helping to grow the corporation from a $500 million organization to over $2 billion during her tenure.

Additional accomplishments at Priority Health Care include development and implementation of a new corporate brand and branding campaign and business development and implementation of a startup pain management pharmacy that generated over $3 million in top line revenue within one year. Joan also provided process development and implementation while incorporating technology to lay the groundwork and infrastructure for a full service marketing department.

Prior to Priority Healthcare, Joan worked as Director of Marketing for Express Scripts, Inc., which included developing and implementing a discount card program; a retail to mail program offering and a fully integrated “in-house� ad agency.

Joan also developed and implemented one of the first medical liaison type organizations in the pharmaceutical industry for Marion Laboratories, Inc. prior to her move into sales and marketing in an international market development role with Marion Merrell Dow. Joan participated and supported product launch strategy and implementation in a variety of roles including appropriate channel distribution methods, improved market uptake and penetration times, pricing and overall clinical and market development.

Joan’s early tenure as an independent consultant in the alternative healthcare market and specialty market included nation-wide speaking engagements, authorship in the fundamentals for managed care book publication, business analysis projects for a venture capitalist organization and numerous new channel market development opportunities.

Joan earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas; and a Master of Arts degree from St. Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri and a Master of Science in Pharmacy, from the University of Florida with an emphasis in Applied Pharmacoeconomics.

Joan currently is Co-Chair of the NASP Educational Sub-Committee.

Chris has more than two decades of experience in healthcare communications, including leadership positions with global pharmaceutical, biotechnology and public relations firms. He founded SmithSolve in 2006 with the conviction that communications is an increasingly powerful business tool.

Chris creates and leads programs spanning corporate communications, corporate branding, product and pipeline communications, investor relations, patient advocacy and employee engagement. Management teams often rely on Chris when deciding what to say and do. Chris is an expert on the rare disease market. He’s also worked in diverse therapeutic categories and across geographies representing many of the world’s leading healthcare companies, including Alexion, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Sanofi.

James E. Valentine is an associate attorney at Hyman, Phelps & McNamara, P.C., where he assists medical product industry clients in a wide range of regulatory matters, including new drug and biologic development and approval issues. Mr. Valentine also works with clients on clinical trials operations and compliance matters.

Before joining the firm in 2014, Mr. Valentine worked in FDA’s Office of Health and Constituent Affairs (previously Office of Special Health Issues) where he facilitated patient input in benefit-risk decision-making and served as a liaison to stakeholders on a wide range of regulatory policy issues. Mr. Valentine administered the FDA Patient Representative Program, facilitated stakeholder consultations during the reauthorization of PDUFA and MDUFA, launched the Patient-Focused Drug Development program, and developed the FDA Patient Network.

Mr. Valentine also worked at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research’s (CDER) Office of Regulatory Policy where he coordinated the implementation of the medical gases certification scheme that was established in FDASIA and handled a variety of postmarket safety issues including REMS and safety labeling changes.

Mr. Valentine earned a law degree from the University of Maryland Carey School of Law and a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Alex has over 20 years’ experience in the pharma/biotech industry and is currently leading initiatives at Roche to improve organizational agility across our global commercial and development organisations, and also how to best approach commercialization in rare diseases. Previously Alex was VP Commercial at Genentech, where he led the Esbriet Franchise commercial organisation (access, key customer, healthcare promotion, patient promotion and strategy teams) to refocus efforts around performance and growth in an orphan respiratory indication (idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis), including the launch of the new tablet formulation.

Prior to Genentech, Alex was General Manager of Roche Indonesia, the second-largest affiliate in the APAC region with over 650 employees. During his time there, he led the organisation to grow net sales more than double the market and Roche Indonesia was the only top five multinational company to increase market share. The Indonesian market is extremely volatile and Alex also had to lead the team to contend with an unprecedented crisis when the government withdrew access for nearly three quarters of the portfolio, but managed to sustain engagement at over 80% across the organization.

Alex joined Roche in January 2013 as Global Therapeutic Area Head for Infectious Diseases, Immunology, Specialty Care and Ophthalmology in Roche Partnering. During this time, Alex led or supervised many transactions, including the acquisition of Intermune in 2014, and helped establish new therapy areas in pRED including immunology and antibiotics. Alex was also a member of the Late Stage Portfolio Committee (LSPC).

Prior to joining Roche, Alex was at GlaxoSmithKline where he was Vice-President and Head of the Immunology & Infectious Diseases Centre of Excellence. In this role Alex’s organization was responsible for all activities for GSK’s medicines in these therapeutic areas, including multiple late stage lifecycle teams, commercial, medical affairs, market access and business development. Alex also had Sub-region General Management responsibility for France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.

Also at GSK, Alex was Vice-President and Head of the HIV Centre of Excellence in GSK, where he led the Europe and Emerging Markets regions through the creation of Viiv, the global joint venture between GSK and Pfizer that combined each company’s HIV businesses into a separate company. Before that, Alex was the Commercial Vice President in Emerging Markets for Neurosciences, Immunology, Urology, GI and Infectious Diseases where he was responsible for leading a large portfolio of medicines through the extensive challenges presented by the diversity of emerging markets - ranging from novel biologics to branded generics.

Alex also previously worked at Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey as Global Commercial Leader in the Virology Franchise, and at Novartis, where he had global responsibility for a portfolio of medicines across respiratory, dermatology and immune-mediated diseases. Alex started his career in the pharmaceutical industry at Glaxo Wellcome, where he held a succession of more senior local and global roles in respiratory and infectious diseases over many years.