Last December, Ashley Fouts moved away from a lab bench. That is, away from her own lab bench. At Genentech, she began a new job keeping track of a molecule and the teams working on it. As a project manager, she facilitates the myriad decisions that are necessary to turn breakthrough science at the bench into life-changing drugs for patients. Genentech’s business is discovery. Genentech wants to be “the leading biotechnology company, using human genetic information to discover, develop, manufacture and commercialize medicines to treat people with serious or life-threatening medical conditions.”
For example, Ashley points to Genentech’s drug Herceptin, a treatment for metastatic breast cancer, as “the first personalized medicine.” Drugs like Herceptin are now commonly called targeted therapies; they can be effective if and when a person’s breast cancer cells have a certain genetic composition. Today, genetic testing of a patient’s cancer cells drives certain decisions about what treatment regimens may be most effective. Herceptin helped lead that pivotal shift in responding to certain diagnoses.
A competitive cyclist and hard-core skier whose early post-college years played out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Ashley would not have predicted her work world today. Still, as she points out, some of her earliest memories of childhood do seem predictive, at least in hindsight.
One of her earliest and happiest memories was of getting lost on her bike with two neighbors. Prowling around in unknown terrain had a certain high tension to it. With no one looking for them or at them, they were free and mobile on their wheels; they discovered a dead mouse in an alley. “What wasn’t to love about that adventure?” Ashley summarizes. “We had freedom, and we discovered something we could examine right up close, with sticks and tools at hand.”
Ashley, who loved math, ran into a crisis when she moved from Denver, Colorado, to Franconia, New Hampshire. For two full years, the Franconia schools did not introduce her to any math she hadn’t already learned in Denver. That deprivation only fed an aggressive appetite, and when she got to Milton, Ashley “dove into the deep end.” She devoured math and science regardless of whether she was formally “ready” for the levels she chose.
At Penn, she took advantage of many different science programs, all over the world, like a semester of marine biology in Australia. She majored in ecology and environmental science, “but that didn’t feel right as a career,” she says. So she put off finding a career and joined the many highly educated skiers living and working in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Her timing was fortuitous.
DNA on parade. Photo @Genentech, vis flickr.com
The CEO of a biotech firm located in La Jolla, California, bought a Jackson Hole company and hired local people to work in his lab, sequencing DNA. “Five of us worked from 3 p.m. until midnight, after skiing all day,” Ashley says. “This is where I learned the basics of molecular biology.” This is also where she discovered how much she loved working at the lab bench. “The physicality of it, building something with my hands, literally running from the centrifuge to the bench — ‘I really like this,’ I thought.” When two Ph.D. friends left the lab for research at Emory, Ashley decided to explore graduate programs herself. She began at Stanford in the biology department but the search for research that met her own definition of excitement led to Stanford’s microbiology and immunology department. “Microbiology is actually comparable to ecology, in that it’s about a pathogen and a host, and all those interactions, at a molecular level.”
“You’re in the deep end,” Ashley comments about research leading to a Ph.D. “The intense problem solving, continually motivating yourself to ‘build and scale brick walls’; then figuring out what the next ‘wall’ should be, building it yourself, and getting over that one as well was rigorous. You develop problem-solving skills, and more than anything, a core of self-motivation.”
“My advisor was fantastic,” Ashley says. “His methodology and focus were similar to Dr. Eyster’s at Milton,” Ashley remarks. “He taught me to ask the questions that would disprove my hypothesis, and ask them as soon as possible. Ask them first, if you can. Researchers tend to ask questions that would prove, rather than disprove, a hypothesis, because doing the opposite is hard. Sometimes, in the end, people catch what’s missing, but not always. There’s a reason why so much of the scientific literature that is published today just doesn’t hold up.”
“A really good scientist develops,” Ashley says. “It’s like cooking: you have this intuition about what you can and can’t do, but it’s building on experience that really matters and enables your skills to grow.”
Having earned her Ph.D., developed a body of work “that held up,” as Ashley describes it, and worked on a post-doc project, Ashley moved from academia to join Genentech’s new program in infectious diseases. She worked on CMV (cytomegalovirus), a common human virus that typically does not become symptomatic. However, if a woman becomes infected with the virus for the first time during pregnancy, the virus passes to the fetus. Babies infected in utero can be severely compromised, developing symptoms that include hearing loss and mental retardation. The virus is also very dangerous for immunosuppressed individuals.
“Developing a drug to treat CMV in pregnant women seemed both noble and important,” Ashley thought, and trying to achieve that was consistent with Genentech’s mission. Ashley was using her training to address basic research questions like, “How does the virus enter a cell?” But what differentiated her work at Genentech from that at Stanford were the other questions that occupied so much of her time. Who are the patients we want to treat? What type of drug might be safest for them? Could such a drug work on CMV? What would a clinical trial look like to test whether it works?
In the end, the decision on Ashley’s molecule was a “no go.” The clinical path involved too many hurdles; the sum of the barriers put the project out of reach. But the rigorous review that led to that negative finding had an alluring appeal: “I got to see all these fun decisions,” Ashley says, “a strategic side of the process, wholly dependent on the science of course, but at a higher level.” It led her to take on an intense new internship at Genentech, testing her aptitude and inclination to help lead at the crucial intersection of science and strategy.
As a result, the whirling set of “as-yet-unknowns” that orbit around the development of any drug are now Ashley’s home base. Her deep, tested knowledge of science is vital, and her role is to help teams work together to craft the bigger picture beyond individual perspectives.
She is a project manager, one of roughly 50 people in a field of 1,200 researchers; she is part of the Portfolio Management and Operations (PMO) group at Genentech. Project managers help “pull everything together,” as Ashley says, on the 30 molecules currently under development at Genentech. “Each molecule has its own devoted teams: pharmacology, clinical, biomarker, core, and technical development (manufacturing). Project managers tend to work on more than one molecule, thus gaining exposure in diverse disease areas.
“I’ll be helping the teams make the best decisions on their molecule, bringing experts from all different functions together and holding team members accountable for their contributions.”
“Once again, I acted opportunistically and followed a passionate interest,” Ashley muses, having now taken on the work of discovery both literally and metaphorically. “Sometimes I ask myself, ‘How does this make sense,’ having left the physical lab bench where I was so thrilled to be?”
“Well, I’m exploring a different sort of ecology,” she says, naming a concept that wraps the present and the past tidily. “You can compare a company to an organism, and in my new role I smooth the interactions between the distinct parts of the company.” The best memory of a 7-year-old lost on her bike may go one better to explain where Ashley is now: the thrill of being lost, the rigor of real evidence, the power of shifting perceptions, the diligent pursuit of a new path.
by Cathleen Everett