Sunil Verma, SVP and Global Head of Oncology at AstraZeneca, has lived a life defined by reinvention. Born in Zambia, raised across Africa, India, and Canada, he was accepted to medical school at 19, became one of the most respected breast cancer oncologists in Canada, built a cancer center in Calgary from the ground up, and then left academia entirely to help write the next chapters of oncology at AstraZeneca alongside the late Jose Baselga.

In this conversation, Sean Khozin and Sunil explore the formative experiences that shaped his worldview and leadership philosophy, what it means to build healthcare infrastructure around the concept of healing, and how AstraZeneca's oncology portfolio expanded from a single asset into one of the most consequential in the world.

They go deep on the science and strategy behind antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), the frontier of ADC and immunotherapy combinations, and a distinction Sunil considers the true next frontier of the field: the difference between precision medicine and genuinely personalized medicine, where patient values are matched to therapeutic value.

As cancer treatments become more powerful and precise, the field of oncology is entering a new era. We are moving beyond the question of "Can we extend life?" to "How do we live with the biology these therapies unleash?"In this episode of Precision Signals, host Sean Khozin is joined by Dr. Afreen Shariff (Director of the Endocrine Neoplasia Program at Duke University) and Jon McDunn (President of Project DataSphere) to discuss the complexities of immune-related adverse events (irAEs). While immune checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionized outcomes for various cancers, they can also trigger inflammatory conditions affecting the thyroid, heart, and nervous system. Our guests explore the "double-edged sword" of immunotherapy and how data science, AI, and clinician-led innovation are bridging the gap between clinical trials and real-world patient care.

In this episode, we discuss:

1. The "Next HIV": Why Dr. Shariff believes cancer care is reaching a similar turning point in long-term management.
2. The Gap in Data: Why traditional clinical trial reporting often fails to capture the nuances physicians see at the bedside.
3. AI & Triage: How unique e-consult models and AI tools are helping oncologists manage complex side effects more efficiently. The Future of Oncology:
4. Predictions on patient-driven care and the push for greater data accessibility to drive innovation.

In this episode of Precision Signals, Sean Khozin sits down with Dr. David Fajgenbaum — physician, scientist, patient, and founder of Every Cure — to explore one of the most extraordinary stories in modern medicine.

As a third-year medical student, David developed idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease, a rare inflammatory disorder that led to multi-organ failure. He was read his last rites five times. Facing a condition with no clear therapeutic roadmap, he began banking his own blood, performing proteomic analyses, and identified an mTOR pathway signal that led to a life-saving repurposed transplant drug.

He has now been in remission for over a decade. But survival was only the beginning.

David went on to found the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network and later co-founded Every Cure, a nonprofit using AI and computational pharmacophenomics to systematically evaluate every approved drug against every known disease. This episode is about moving from serendipity to strategy in medicine — and what it will take to build systems that leave no patient behind.