Amy Abernethy: Poised To Propel FDA Into Tech-Savvy, Patient-Centric Future

FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb's recently announced appointment of Dr. Amy Abernethy to serve as his first lieutenant perfectly exemplifies the sort of thinking that has enabled Gottlieb to earn nearly universal praise at a time of unprecedented partisanship. He has focused his attention on high-priority, immediate concerns like the targeting of e-cigarettes to children, the opioid epidemic, and the need for a more robust market in affordable generic medications, while also seeking to prepare the agency to engage with emerging technologies, from consumer wearables to applications of artificial intelligence, to expand the breadth of evidence generation and accelerate the speed of analysis. Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD, formerly Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientific Officer, and Senior Vice President, Flatiron Health, and recently named Deputy Commissioner of the FDA.A. Abernethy Abernethy combines the pragmatic humanism of an oncologist (which she is) with the technological sophistication of someone who spent their teenage years attending math camp and programming computers for NASA – after originally learning math by helping her mother edit a nursing textbook, as she recently told Lisa Suennen and me on our Tech Tonics podcast. The key challenge that Dr. Abernethy has focused on throughout her career – first in academia, at Duke, and more recently in business – is how to close the gap between clinical practice and clinical research. While at Duke, it struck her as odd, if not absurd, that she'd see patients in her oncology practice on a Monday, and then they'd need to come back on Tuesday to participate in a clinical trial she was conducting, because the two activities were considered so distinct.