Sunita Badola, Head of External Partnership and Patient-centric Data Strategy, R&D Computational Biology, Takeda Pharmaceuticals was winner for the 2018 Takeda Oncology Innovation Award. This award was recently announced at Takeda Oncology Development Annual Meeting in Boston. The award considers four major aspects in a project for being called out as a winner. Criteria were exploiting expertise, building capabilities, advancing the reputation, displaying the entrepreneurial spirit along with the focus of making a difference in patients’ life. The projects are judged by the Takeda senior leadership and external Takeda consultants.

Sunita won the award for her project “Building a Network of Enigmatic Exceptional Responders (NEER)
to Learn and Test Hypotheses from the Miracle Patients”.  The goal of this project is to enable and conduct the systematic study of exceptional responders by establishing a registry and a research data network containing the molecular profiling, phenotypic, family history, lifestyle, environmental exposures and clinical records of these patients. She started this project two years ago in collaboration with Dr Isaac Kohane, Chair, Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School under the leadership of Dr Eric Perakslis (Ex-Takeda SVP Data Science Institute). She led this project with a small team within Takeda to identify exceptional responders in various clinical trials and established an operational roadmap to enroll these patients. Once the patients were enrolled, data architecture, analytics and visualization were built under her leadership. This project is a true partnership with the patients and treating physicians at various cancer centers. Sunita is also leading efforts to build NEER Pharma consortium by encouraging other pharma giants such as Pfizer, Sanofi and JNJ to join the effort. She has been funded and supported internally by the Oncology clinical science, Global medical affairs, Data science and Computational biology group to continue to expand this initiative. This project is allowing the researchers to query and visualize the integrated data from these miracle patients in-reference to rest of the patients. She also conducted a patient advisory panel at Takeda in collaboration with R&D patient engagement office to discuss the data sharing with patients. Sunita has been able to fulfill her vision and expand the scope due to the nurturing environment by Takeda. She acknowledges the entire team, her mentors and Takeda to believe in her and providing her the space to innovate and dare to discover.

In addition, Sunita is part of the HBA (Healthcare Business Women Association) and completed the Women Unlimited LEAD program. She enjoys mentoring the junior colleagues and was recently invited by Harvard for a Navigator seminar series to discuss career path with students and post docs. She also provides guidance and mentorship to many high school kids. She has been working in Pharmaceutical Industry for 21 years and is very passionate about drug development.  After graduating from IIT Roorkee she completed further studies at Case Western Reserve University, OH. She lives with her family in Chelmsford. The family is actively involved in many New England Indian community associations including EKAL, SETU, SEWA, Hindi Manch, RangManch, Uttarakhand Association.

|