CEO’s Address
SPECIAL LECTURE: CEO’s Address
Gina Carithers (Prostate Cancer Foundation)
Introduction by Howard Soule (Prostate Cancer Foundation)
View the Transcript Below:
CEO’s Address
Howard Soule, PhD [00:00:17] It’s now my real pleasure to introduce our PCF president and chief executive officer, Gina Carithers. Gina is a unique person with immense experience, almost 40 years now, in biopharmaceutical and healthcare communications, marketing, business development. She is the founder of a digital communication system that I think most of you in the room have heard of. If you haven’t, you should look it up. It’s UroToday. It’s a phenomenal resource for physician-to-physician interaction and more and more on a global basis. It’s of great utility for patients. She is obviously the founder of that organization that sold it to PCF a few years ago and is now helping us to fund science with the success of that company. Gina has immense energy, and I want to thank you for infusing that energy into a new generation of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. You are making our future bright every day, and we look forward to your talk.
Gina Carithers [00:01:54] Hi everyone, and it’s wonderful to be with you today. I’m going to talk a little bit about where I came from in my career. I know some of you know me better than others, and many of you have been featured on or supported UroToday in multiple different ways, but I’m gonna go back a little bit and talk about where I came from and how I’ve been taken by driving innovation through science and really touching patients. If we think about, but I look back, Howard said 40 years, it’s close. I joined the work industry after graduating from UC Berkeley in 1980. And I joined DuPont Pharmaceuticals, and at the time, DuPont was interested in establishing clinical trials in the San Francisco, Northern California area, that would potentially demonstrate that a drug called coumadin that was first given to President Eisenhower in the 1950s before I was born, that this drug actually could work on the arterial side and prevent strokes, similarly to the way it works on the venous side. So, the first work I did was setting up clinical trials in the San Francisco area, up to Davis and down to Army Hospital in Monterey. And through those years, I met an individual when we did an acquisition of American Critical Care who suggested that I should consider changing my focus from science, not go to medical school, and really learn how to think about the business of the industry that was growing right before our eyes. So, it’s been an interesting history. At DuPont, I took on, I guess, 12 roles in the 21 years. I moved six times. Today, fortunately for us with technology, we physically move less than I had to. But each of those moves gave an opportunity for growth and development. It really was the beginning of me understanding how this transformation of this industry, which was at the time and for many years since, either the leader in the U.S. Economy or second only to technology. I know we have many industry partners here. There are multiple industry partners that touch us all the time. And they are integrated into the fabric of what has grown to be what we understand to extend our lives, not just in the United States, but globally. Mike spoke about the economics this morning, and the economics of the pharmaceutical industry is really quite significant when we look back at life expectancy when Medicare was first thought to be something we should do in the 1930s. Our life expectancy in this country for white men was 47 years of age. So, the idea that any of us would live to be 65 was quite far-fetched. And with the changes of new technology, new drugs, we saw our life expectancy extend. And that’s really, I think where we all share commonality is looking at how this industry has extended the lives of us as humans and our quality of life. And that began for me, really beginning to understand the power of collaboration, back at DuPont. It was my mentors who really set me up to understand that business was able to be at the heart of the interaction for how we did not just drug development, but how we changed the lives of everyone in the world. And I learned quite importantly, I think Skip mentioned earlier today when the Clinton administration was starting, I was sent out to do lobbying in Washington, D.C. Because we were so concerned about how those transformations that they were going to bring about would impact us and would impact the world that we knew in terms of being able to treat patients in this country and around the globe. And of course, as we all know, what we learned. Was to think ahead and to change with those times that became so important to us. Anyway, that that was one period of my life when I was first an entrepreneur. I was on the streets by myself, actually shaping and changing legislation and working in policy between Washington, D.C., Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, and Missouri. And the lessons from that really taught me that collaborating with my industry partners who were out there with me but also understanding that our legislatures did not understand the work we did. They fundamentally don’t understand our healthcare system. They don’t understand what we know is so important. And you can see that it plays out over and over again. And today we face the threats of funding largely for the fact that there is consumption with not the facts but opinion. At any rate, it’s important that we hold on to the truth of science and the data that leads us. And that was the second component of my career. DuPont Pharmaceuticals was sold in 2001. And at the time of the sale, I was leading our global HIV franchise. And that was a franchise that I was brought into Wilmington, Delaware to start in about 1996. And in that era, I learned that we didn’t have the luxury of publications to get out the science that we were doing or that our industry partners were doing and that was happening around the globe. What was going to treat men with HIV and AIDS and how are we going to save their lives? So, in 1998, we brought our first drug at DuPont Pharmaceuticals to the market. I led that franchise from 1998 through 2001. And we were sold to Bristol Myers Squibb because they were interested in having that. I know many people have gone through acquisitions and been part of acquisitions and mergers in this room. And it is a life-changing opportunity. At that time, I stepped back from the drug industry, moved back to California, which my husband was living as a physicist at UC Berkeley to try and figure out what was the next phase of my life. And I started to consult with Yamanouchi Pharmaceuticals. So today they’re known as Astellas. And at the time they were not in the United States. They had urology products, they outsourced those products to companies like Boehringer Ingelheim and others in this country. And they were interested in having a footprint in the United States. Today they are Astellas after they merged with Fujisawa. But in the very early days, they asked me if I would develop a marketing program for them. And help them to become entrenched in urology. Now I knew nothing, nothing about urology. I didn’t know urologists were surgeons. My background had been in cardiovascular medicine, in Parkinson’s disease, with launching carbidopa levodopa extended-release with Merck, and then finally with our HIV product of efavirenz. And so, I wanted to learn okay, what does this mean, urology? And I went out to Pennsylvania. I met Alan Wein, who was the chairman at the time at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the longest serving chairs, I believe, in urology in the United States. And he just retired a few years ago. Alan took me under his wing and he said, Let me teach you what this is. And I spent six months in Pennsylvania going through a program with the residents that he was training. He didn’t have a fellowship program. And through that I realized, wow, you know, there was all this conversation in the live education program that we built around robots and what Intuitive was going to do to change the face of urology. And that was the first area they were focused on. And a person by the name of Ralph Clayman, who’s down at University of California, Irvine, Ralph was one of our educators that I selected to teach about the robot. And I saw the changes, the consternation that was going on because even all the surgeons Alan was training, they were learning open procedures. And how were they going to learn laparoscopic and then move to robotic? And what about what would happen when they left the program? How would their education and learning continue? And so, from that, I decided to build a global website that would be free of charge that didn’t require physicians to have to purchase journal articles. Most around the globe just didn’t have access. And you know, if we think about what India and South America and many parts of this world were like back in 2001 and 2002, publications weren’t a part of their access. And journals in this country, they weren’t digitalized. And so, I took a page out of the book of what was Medscape when I was in HIV, and I built a website with the help of many European urologists and Alan here in the US, and that became UroToday. So UroToday’s initial focus was urology. I focused it on the transformation between robots and moving from open procedures to robots. And one of the unique things that I found when I was working with Intuitive and the urologists around the country was the challenges that came about from learning new technology in moving from an open procedure to using ports and to be able to do laparoscopic and then ultimately robotic procedures. Today I’m not sure that any open procedures are trained for in the United States. And during COVID, one of the European urologists I know said that they were going back in Belgium to doing open procedures because of the fear of cleaning robots at the time. And so, we saw how this transformation occurred over a decade and a half in this country. Today, UroToday became far more multidisciplinary. And it actually started, Cora Sternberg was a person I met in 2006 at a conference in Europe. And the topic of the conference was to bring together the multi-specialties that affected GU tumors. And Cora was one of a few in the room, as a medical oncologist, that really caught my attention because I thought, okay, how does this look? And at the time we spent a lot of the conversations on kidney cancer and bladder cancer and how the roles of medical oncologists influenced what the urologists were doing. And urology is practiced very differently in Europe, I came to understand that, than it is in the US. I think that’s still true. However, the idea of taking UroToday to be multidisciplinary was born out of that meeting in 2006. And so today we service not only medical oncology, but we service radiation oncology, nuclear medicine, and pathology, and anyone who touches any part of the diseases that affect our lower urinary tract. If we look back at where we are today, this is data for the first six months of 2025. We reach 195 countries. It wasn’t kismet, actually, this was a lot of work. I intentionally went to the various countries, South Korea to their urology meeting, into Japan and around the globe to bring UroToday to them initially. I initiated the building of web email, and so I needed a database, and rather than buy any database or access to what was at the time emails, I decided to do it organically. To this day, it is still organic. To this day, we reach about 80,000 individuals around the globe each day through email addresses. And we focus exclusively on urologic diseases, but integrating in all of the specialties. We have 7.5 million page views year to date through September. We have about four and a half million site visitors that are unique. We are global, as I discussed, and the US represents roughly 44% of our audience and the rest of the world. And we are deeply entrenched into most countries of the world, and we’re constantly looking to evolve and grow how we communicate. And of course, social media became a significant part of our transformation. And it was nice during the European Society of Medical Oncology meeting that ended just this week, earlier this week. For those of you who are there, it’s great that you’re in this room. I didn’t have the courage to go, but if we look at that particular conference, we will see that UroToday communicated aggressively. We have scientists in the US, physicians who actually are attending the sessions, taking screenshots of the images, and we post the vast majority of that content within four hours of the conclusion of the session, and people like Zach Klaassen are up all night, most of those nights, making sure that conference content is translated to those who want it. You will see that there’s a product out there called simpler. It’s been taken over by one of the large marketing agencies, Real Chemistry in the United States. But UroToday is a force. And what really makes me proud, and the reason I’m sharing this data today is that this is the European Society of Medical Oncology. This isn’t a urology meeting. And you know you’ve made it when your content is actually being presented at the meetings that are being discussed at the forefront of data. And UroToday will be quoted in many of the conferences coming up for the data that exists on the site because of the hard work that our people do. It’s interesting, this little engine has five full time employees. So, it’s really quite an amazing feat. But technology has taken us there. We’ve been able to streamline and build and grow through the fact that it is technologically based. Perseverance is not a long race, right? It’s many races one after the other. And so, in my career, the acquisition of UroToday by the Prostate Cancer Foundation was actually an amazing change. And Chuck Ryan had come to me and asked about acquiring UroToday, and they spent several months looking at the company and making the decision to bring it on to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. And initially, I have to admit, I had great trepidation. I knew the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Howard Soule, who wouldn’t know because Howard was at every conference, always looking for the best and the brightest scientists and tracking the science that not only they were funding, but the great work of many in the field. And so, at the end of 2021, UroToday was fully acquired by the Prostate Cancer Foundation, and that was a significant transformation in my personal journey. Chuck asked if I would actually build a marketing group inside of Prostate Cancer Foundation. I knew I would spend three years here because that’s what I committed to. I had no idea what was a nonprofit. I had no idea the inner workings of a foundation. And early on, I made the decision that okay. I will donate a young investigator and find out what this work is actually about and say, okay, let me take some of the great opportunity that PCF is giving me and put it back into a young scientist. And through that, I really learned that you take young people and you give them the opportunity to express the science that they’re interested in and you watch them grow. So, I had that wonderful opportunity with Nick Zorko, who was our YI, my husband’s and my young investigator, from the University of Minnesota. And to this day, I am extremely grateful that the Prostate Cancer Foundation took a risk on expanding just doing all of this amazing science with you to also taking and playing a role in expanding on that science and being able to communicate it through a platform like UroToday. So today, as the president and CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, I, along with you, face a very changing landscape. Not only is the funding changing, and that’s been quite significant, but for the first time in quite some time, we’re seeing an increasing rate of prostate cancer being diagnosed. So, we’re seeing a 4.8% rising rate of prostate cancer year over year. So last year we diagnosed in this country about 299,000 cases of prostate cancer, and this year it’ll be closer to 314,000. And what else has changed since I first entered this space, in 2001 roughly 1% of men were being diagnosed with metastatic disease. And that actually held pretty closely up through 2012 when the US Preventative Task Force Services decided that they would give screening a grade D recommendation. And I remember being at the AUA meeting when that was announced and thinking what ramifications will this have? What will really the outcome of this be? And today we know. We see that 22 to 25% of men in the United States are being diagnosed with distal metastatic disease. And that is a significant transformation. So, yes, while the amazing work of this organization has led to many new therapies, it’s critically important that we as an organization step back and understand what it is that we need to do in order to stop this disease from moving forward. We inherited an organization whose vision was to end the death and suffering from prostate cancer. I think those were actually Chuck’s words. He translated the history of PCF into that and leveraging innovation and collaboration, much of which were the hallmarks of the legacy of the founding of this organization. We know that our mission has always been. Stated from the very early days to cure this disease. And so now, as we look at the present landscape and the accelerating rate of change for which we’re experiencing in the funding of the disease and in also the changing of the biology of this disease and the incidence of this disease, we’re faced with options that Howard Soule helped us to work on with Jonathan Simons and say, let’s focus directly on key areas that we will fund. And so, not surprising to most of you, our first area of funding is theragnostics. It’s continued from many years all the way back to the early days of the founding of the organization when Neil Bander was funded in 1993. Drugging what are today undruggable targets, looking to be at first in field immunotherapies, and looking to leverage AI to improve patient outcomes and leveraging that technology in the work that’s being done. We come from an amazing history, right? We know that Mike talked about this this morning. That in order to change what the knowledge base was around prostate cancer and to attract fundraising and money into being able to do research in prostate cancer, he did the March on Washington. Today we have over 2,250 researchers. We’re in our third generation of the class of young investigators, which started in 2007, and we have about 450 YIs, 30 from this year in 2025. We have 14 FDA approvals where PCF was instrumental in funding, seed funding, in the initial work. We are due research, as Mike mentioned earlier, in 28 global countries. And we also know that one of the hallmarks that the original founders of CaP CURE stated was that we needed to be a collaborative organization, an organization that shared data early and helped lift everyone up to know what was the latest that was emerging. I’ve selected one scientific project to highlight in the legacy of PCF. And this was the Dream Teams East and the Dream Teams West. And in running UroToday, I have a physician scientist who every month writes about our clinical trials. And most recently he defined this trial as the stand up to cancer. And I went back and I discussed with people like, you know, what’s interesting is stand up to cancer actually never came through with the funding. This was PCF who went out and created the funding. It was done by Jonathan and by Howard and others in this room. To drive the funding to fulfill the promise of this study. And what’s amazing about looking at this landmark study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015 to 2016, started the research, I believe in 2012 to 2014. If we take a look at the impact of this research, what we see is that it led to four today, we have four PARP inhibitors in the US. And it also led to the change at the FDA to have Pembrolizumab to be used in MSI high because these are specific mutations associated with the germline of men with prostate cancer. And so, when you have targets, you target the treatment and you get improved outcomes. If we look at PCF’s history, we’ve talked about the 14 drugs that we’ve seeded. These are drugs that are specific to prostate cancer. This doesn’t include the funding of people like Jim Allison. And Jim’s drug, as most of us know, went on to be acquired by Bristol Meyer Squibb and then studied in prostate cancer. In 2005, 6 and 7, UroToday actually promoted that trial globally in their target countries to accrue and get recruitment. And it was successful, but unfortunately the drug was too toxic. You know the history of these things, but the legacy of PCF is rich with these amazing transformations that, with industry partners, and with the scientists in this room, and many who’ve been funded also who are not in this room, we see an enduring legacy. So, I share with you a lot about where we’ve been as an organization and the amazing outcomes of the work we’ve done. And so now let’s talk a little bit about what PCF needs to do to meet this moment in time. Because this moment is different from the most recent moments, right? We’re challenged to change what we do from an organizational perspective in order to meet the needs that you have for funding towards the future. We’re building a roadmap at PCF to see how it is that we need to meet this moment together. We currently fund roughly $30 to $35 million of research a year. This year it’ll be $35 million. And it’s a heavy lift in the current world to get our donors to fund us. If we look towards the future where PCF has the potential to be, is in the next three years, we should deliver $70 million of funding to you. And beyond that, 100, and our goals should be up to 150 million. Mike talked with us about the transfer of wealth from the current baby boomer generation. And that’s a piece of it. But there’s other things that we can do differently as an organization. We’ve been so lucky in the richness of the scientists we have, but also the donor base that the Prostate Cancer Foundation has cultivated. The donors that we have are committed to helping you fund science that they know and believe in based on the credibility of PCF that will actually impact the future lives of not only people in the United States, but men and their families around the world and well beyond prostate cancer into many other tumor types. So, first, we looked inside at where we are. Howard and Andrea have led the science organization flawlessly. They’ve been able to garner great scientists and to fund amazing work. And we know that that needs to continue. And around them need to be a group of development experts who can actually go out and explain to our donors what it is the great work that you’re doing, and to bring you to our donors so that they can understand from your experience what you’re doing today and how it transcends to the future tomorrow. And then we’re building a team around it. We’re building a development operations team that actually gives us the data to drive us to understand where we should be fundraising. We haven’t had a very developed technological system within PCF. The organization was started well before technology was the mainstream on how you built the foundation of an organization. So, we’re retrenching and doing that today. We’re building sports and corporate partnerships. These are essential. Today, we’re working with Kimberly Clark. And it’s interesting, I went into Kimberly Clark for a lunch and learn with their senior executives and the members of their teams. And the one thing I learned from them was that their perception is that if they talk about the products they make, particularly the guards for post-op patients and men with incontinence issues postoperatively, that they will be interpreted as wanting prostate cancer to happen. And so, we’ve worked with them to shift the mindset. And today they’re donating a young investigator each year through the proceeds that they’re getting from their campaign. If we look at the four areas in which the prostate cancer foundation can impact, we look at our physician scientists and researchers. We have in this room and with many of your colleagues around the globe, really the best and the brightest who’ve been funded. And you know, in conversations, you know, you see the early years, you know, Arie Belldegrun, who just did this amazing talk about the innovation that he’s brought forward. And he was funded as one of the early scientists. Certainly not one of our young investigators since 2007, but the transformations that get yielded from him and many of you in this room are beyond anyone’s comprehension. Not only are you changing our understanding of the biology of this disease, but you’re changing how this disease is treated and the outcomes of men and for men and their families. If we look at the environment in which you’re working today, it is in our best interest, and it is essential, that the Prostate Cancer Foundation double the funding that we’re giving you in the next couple of years and double it again in the four years after that. If we look at our donors, they’re amazing, right? But we need to engage beyond the current donors we have. Mike laid out for us a challenge with the transformation of wealth, that we should be in a position as an organization to capture those funds for the work you do and to fund you back with that. We also have a commitment to our donors to help them share in the success that you’re creating by bringing to them the work that you do. So, it’s important that, we know many of you necessarily don’t meet the donors who are represented behind the funding that you’re getting, but yet those individuals have a very avid interest in your work, your vision, and where that can go. And we’re accelerating at a good rate through our development team inside that you will work with them, the development team, to bring what you’re doing to our donors to further their interest in not just your work, but in the work of this area and cancer research at large. And finally, our industry partners. You know, I came from the drug industry as I just shared with you. And so, I’ve always looked at the drug industry as sharing in the basic tenet that patients are at the center of the work we do. They’re at the center of the work you do as researchers and physician scientists. They’re at the center of the work for our donors, many of whom have had personal impacts of prostate cancer or other cancers. Our industry partners are those who are out taking your great ideas and extending them to change the lives for the better of all of the people who are impacted by prostate cancer. So many of our industry sponsors, you know, Howard earlier today thanked many of them. The UroToday platform wouldn’t exist really and wouldn’t have continued on without our industry partners. It was the approval of abiraterone acetate. In 2011, that actually changed UroToday and put it into the place it is today of communicating breaking science. It didn’t happen in 2004 when docetaxel was approved, and I think largely because there was resistance and continue to be resistance to the use of chemotherapy in the men with prostate cancer. But the fact is that it is the industry that coming together with our organization that has allowed for much of the transformation along with the donors. And finally, why do we do it all? For the patients and their loved ones. And you know far more than I do the impact on patients. It’s interesting. Not long after PCF acquired UroToday, I had had a vision for a long time that I wanted to have a Prostate Cancer Patient Voices website, a website where men could go and listen to the stories of other men who have this disease, how they were diagnosed, what the challenges were, what the fear was, what the anxiety was, and how the timing of that diagnosis took place. And so, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, whom I met with at ASCO GU 2022, and Frank Verholen in particular, believed in what we could do and funded the building of the Prostate Cancer Patient Voices. And today it sits out there as a hallmark for all men who can share their stories. And now it’s taken on a life of its own. Where men are able, and their wives and their partners and their children to talk about how this journey has impacted them. So, all of patients are at the heart of everything. And we’re extremely proud of the work that all of you have done because that work actually translates into saving people’s lives and improving the quality of life for the years they have. And that can’t be overstated. PCF has built a webinar series. When I came in, Chuck was working with Sirius XM Radio, and they wanted to do a series, a webinar series, and it seemed great, right? Dr. Radio, Stacey Loeb leads that. They were very excited. And Becky Campbell, who works at PCF, and I sat down and we did an agenda and a program, and we thought this is terrific. And then when it launched, we learned, okay, well, it’s only carried live. So, we started to say, well, how do we impact it? How can we change that? So, we built a webinar series, and again, our industry sponsors have supported this work. And now we engage between four to five thousand patients every time we do one webinar. And the webinars are run on a monthly basis, and those have sprung into summits, patient summits on disease-specific components of where we are in the treatment of prostate cancer. And we look at the combination of our webinars and now our new website as centerpieces to being able for patients and caregivers and anyone out there interested even in donating to us to be able to access information about prostate cancer, the disease, and the foundation, and then how to take action and how we’re growing our fundraising capabilities. These are all new lifts, there are changes that have taken place, and most recently, we were able to partner with AstraZeneca in building a biomarker testing guide specific to patients. And many of you in this room who have a fond interest on genetic, genomic testing, as well as looking at and understanding somatic testing, have helped this piece be delivered by our internal team so that patients can have easy access to the information. And I know this is work that’s been going on for several years now since we had our first PARP inhibitors. How to get over the hurdles to get the testing done, to bring the information to the health care providers, but we have to get the patients and the urologists on the same page so that the medical oncologist has the information they need to effectively treat. So those are some of our more recent things that we’ve accomplished in 2025, with much more to do as we move forward together. Our mission has grown, as I mentioned. Last year at this meeting, Felix Feng approached me, and Felix and I had done a lot of work together over the years for UroToday, and he came to me and he said, Look, I want to do whatever I can do to help with the fundraising of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. And so, we sat down for about 45 minutes a year ago at this meeting when Felix was with us, and we recorded his voice. We had the opportunity to share a very small piece of this story as he went from researcher and physician scientist to patient. And I’d like to share that with you now in closing, because truly we celebrate the legacy of all of you, what you have brought to PCF, the legacy that PCF is, and the next steps we have to go. And I hope that you find the voice of Felix as inspiring as we did. At the Hamptons fundraiser at the end of August this year, we had 16 hands go up immediately at the conclusion of this video. We raised $8.2 million at the end of this video within the first 10 minutes. So, Felix is extraordinary. He is a part of your community, our community, and it’s the work that you do, just like the work that Felix did. That transforms the lives of all the patients. So, thanks very much. I look forward to working with you.
Felix Feng, MD [00:39:13] Hello, my name is Felix Feng. I’m a cancer researcher and physician at the University of California at San Francisco. And I just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself. So, I immigrated to the United States with my family when I was three years old. And what has dominated my life at an early age is unfortunately cancer. It’s really affected my family. You know, when you see the entire spectrum of prostate cancer from the basic lab all the way to big clinical trials that are run internationally, you understand what a crippling disease this can be. And in my case, it makes you really want to do something about it. And so, you know, with the help of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, we’ve spent the last 15 to 20 years studying this disease. We’ve collectively made a lot of advances. Now, it’s one thing to be a cancer researcher and a cancer doctor, but it’s another thing to be a cancer patient. And so, a year and a half ago, I was diagnosed with a cancer myself. And so, I, for better or worse, have seen many aspects of the cancer journey and what I can say is we need help. We need additional funding, we need additional young minds to go into cancer research. We need to apply new technologies to solve this problem. And it’s going to take an entire community and society as well. And that’s where the Prostate Cancer Foundation steps in. Helping support research like this is game changing. Please join us in this effort. Thank you.