Ep 78: How Antibody Drug Conjugates Are Changing Cancer Care with Dr. Milana Dolezal-The Patient from Hell Podcast
In this powerful episode of The Patient From Hell, host Samira Daswani welcomes Jill Massey, a seasoned pharmacist and pharmaceutical industry leader whose relationship with cancer is both deeply personal and professional. Jill shares her journey as a caregiver—supporting her sister, mother, and husband through their cancer diagnoses—before confronting her own battle with the disease. Together, they discuss the emotional weight of caregiving, the hurdles within the healthcare system, and how Jill’s dual perspective as both a medical expert and a patient has shaped her advocacy, decision-making, and resilience.
Key Highlights:
- Blending Professional Expertise with Personal Experience: Jill reflects on how witnessing cancer up close influenced her career in the pharmaceutical industry, driving her commitment to patient-centered care.
- Shifting Roles, Shifting Perspectives: From caregiver to patient, Jill opens up about the emotional challenges of each role and the strategies that helped her navigate them.
- Knowledge as a Tool for Empowerment: She emphasizes the importance of patient education, self-advocacy, and the evolving role of pharmaceutical companies in prioritizing patient needs.
About Our Guest:
Jill Massey, PharmD, MBA, BCMAS, serves as the Vice President of Global Medical Strategy and Operations (GMSO) at Gilead Medical Affairs. In this role, she leads initiatives focused on patient-centered implementation science, medical strategy, digital innovation, and scientific communications.
Prior to joining Gilead, Jill held leadership positions at Immunomedics, Janssen, The Medicines Company, and Melinta Therapeutics, where she spearheaded medical affairs programs and played a key role in global antimicrobial resistance initiatives. She began her career at Bristol-Myers Squibb and has also served as clinical faculty at Saint Louis College of Pharmacy, Jewish Hospital, and Washington University School of Medicine’s Program on Aging.
Beyond her corporate leadership, Jill is actively involved in advisory boards, including the Life Sciences Council Steering Committee and the National Advisory Committee for the Robert A. Winn Diversity in Clinical Trials Award Program. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Morris County Chamber of Commerce.
Jill earned her Doctor of Pharmacy from the University of Nebraska Medical Center and an MBA from Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business. She completed her residency at Mercer University School of Pharmacy and Emory University and holds Board Certification from the Accreditation Council of Medical Affairs.
When she’s not working, Jill enjoys running, baking, and spending time with her two children, Maddie and Alex, along with her beloved pets—including two dogs and a cat.
Key Moments:
At 27:44 “I have an analogy around metastasis. I worked on an MD PhD in Philadelphia and I spent a lot of time in Manhattan, so I go to Manhattan almost every, every, every weekend. If you think about how to get around Manhattan. Let's say you want to go from Grand Central to the Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There's a lot of ways you could go. You could walk up Fifth Avenue, go by the park. That's nice. Walk up Park Avenue. That's also nice. You could bike. You could take an Uber. These are all sort of above ground ways that you can go to the Met. Well, what does cancer do? It's really using Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, so why don't we just shut those two down? We'll bring an antibody in. We'll bring a HER2 antibody in. We'll bring something in above the ground, what we call above the cell, extracellular. So you stop these things. Well, pretty soon I don't even care about underground and above ground, I'm just going to go underground, then you got the Lexington line. You can take whatever you want, right? And so that's how the cancer figures out by using things like PI3 kinase, AKT, mTOR, all these inside of the cell underground mutations. Now it's using the subway to move, to grow, little circulating tumor cells going around, so anyway, that's kind of how sneaky cancer can be. It's constantly figuring out detours, mutations, above ground, below ground.”
At 47:16 “The one thing I think that is an important take home is that when you start treating the cancer effectively, patients feel better and they have a better quality of life.The bottom line is when we start treating the cancer, you see pretty quickly within two or three cycles, so within four to six weeks, patients are spending less time in bed. They're less fatigued, so that's the seesaw balance of toxicity versus efficacy. If you have a drug that isn't working well in a patient, but that's just giving them toxicity, nobody wants to live an extra seven, eight months if the time is not quality and they're just going to be in bed the whole time suffering.”
At 48:43 “We start with dose reductions, because I would hate to overdo it and then miss a couple cycles because we're recovering from side effects. I'll start at a lower dose with the idea of possibly dose escalating, especially in older patients who are on a lot of other medications and are kind of frail, right? I'll start at a lower dose because I know I'm not going to cure the patient and we're going to be on this therapy as long as it works, both from a cancer fighting standpoint and from a toxicity standpoint.”
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