Seattle-based NanoString Technologies sees itself growing from a research tool company into a more diversified player with diagnostic tests that enable more personalized cancer medicine. Now it has hired its first sales and marketing leader to take the fruit of NanoString R&D, and turn it into this potentially large new line of business.
Bruce Seeley, the former executive vice president of commercial operations at Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SGEN]]), has joined NanoString as its new senior vice president and general manager of diagnostics. Seeley’s mandate is to figure out the detailed commercial strategy, and hire key sales lieutenants, who will sell NanoString’s nCounter machine as a diagnostic platform for assessing whether a patient has breast cancer that will relapse.
NanoString, which raised $20 million last November from an investment group that included GE and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer, is betting much of its future on its ability to build a big diagnostics business. The company has already had some success, building a team of 100 employees, who research, develop, and sell nCounter machines for top genetic research centers like the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA. But that market has its limits, especially in an era when federal research budgets are tight, so NanoString’s challenge will be to generate excitement among a whole new set of customers—oncologists who treat patients.
While Seeley, 48, has spent his career marketing targeted cancer drugs like Genentech’s trastuzumab (Herceptin) and Seattle Genetics’ brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris), he has no prior experience in the diagnostics business. That’s OK, NanoString CEO Brad Gray says, because nobody has really created a model yet like NanoString aspires to for diagnostics, and Seeley’s experience is as relevant as anybody’s for the task.
Specifically, NanoString needs to show doctors that it has a powerful new tool for assessing whether a woman with breast cancer is likely to relapse, by analyzing a proprietary 50-gene signature known as PAM50.
“We need to primarily educate the oncologists on how they can improve their practice based on the information we provide,” Gray says. “So we went to a commercial leader with a long history of educating oncologists to improve therapy. That’s traditionally been done best in the oncology therapeutic area, rather than in oncology diagnostics. Bruce has a tremendous history working on innovative and high value therapeutic products, and that translates perfectly into what we want to do with PAM50.”
Seattle Genetics has clearly had a big success in the early days of marketing its first cancer drug, but Seeley left the company in the drug’s early days, just six months after it won FDA approval. “My experience at SeaGen was spectacular. It’s a great company and a phenomenal product. It was a great opportunity. And after launch was successfully off the ground, I thought about what’s next,” Seeley says.
Seeley said he met with Gray to discuss the NanoString commercial position after he left Seattle Genetics in February.
“The technology at Nanostring is where the future of cancer therapy is going—more personalized cancer therapy,” Seeley says. “I saw NanoString as a way to leverage my experience on cutting-edge innovative targeted therapies, and add on some new experience with innovative diagnostics. The common theme on the therapeutic side and the diagnostic side is with helping patients. What sealed the deal for me is that inside NanoString, everybody I spoke with has a very strong passion for patients. They understand what PAM50 means for patients.”
Seeley will have some time to figure out NanoString’s
