Asking the Right Questions
What a refugee camp, a cancer center, and AstraZeneca's oncology franchise have in common
I sat down with Sunil Verma for a conversation on Precision Signals. Sunil is SVP and Global Head of Oncology at AstraZeneca. I’ve known him for several years, going back to my time leading CancerLinQ, when we were both haunted by the same uncomfortable truth: that somewhere inside the vast, ungoverned ocean of cancer data, there were answers to questions patients were dying before we could ask.
That stubbornness, that refusal to make peace with the distance between what medicine knows and what it does, runs through everything Sunil has built.
There is a moment in the history of any science when its central metaphor begins to crack. For oncology, that metaphor has been the war. We have been at war with cancer for half a century, and the language of that war, targets, weapons, armies of cells, battles won and lost, has shaped not just how we speak about the disease but how we see the patient inside it. Sunil does not use that language. What he talks about instead is matching. The right therapy, yes, but matched to the right person, and not just their biology. Their values. What they need to protect in order to keep living the life they are living.
It sounds almost simple when you say it like that. But this kind of simplicity is the hardest thing to arrive at. It requires you to hold the full complexity of a human being in one hand and the full complexity of modern oncology in the other, and to believe, without flinching, that the two can be reconciled.
His father learned something like this under circumstances that make the word difficult feel inadequate. In 1947, when the British partition of India split the subcontinent along a line drawn in six weeks, nearly fifteen million people were displaced in what remains one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Sunil’s father was among them, a child in a refugee camp, waking at four in the morning to sell wheat so he could pay for his own schooling and his brother’s. Not a lesson about medicine, but about the relationship between effort and meaning, about what it costs to insist on a future the present has not yet made room for. Sunil carried that inheritance with him across three continents and into a career that has, in ways both visible and quiet, helped rewrite what is possible for patients with cancer.
What strikes me most, even now, is that he still seems to be just getting started. Not in the performative way people announce their ambitions, but in the way a person looks when they have finally found the right question and know they will spend the rest of their life trying to answer it honestly.