Welcome. I'm Dr. Vinay Prasad. I'm a hematologist, oncologist, and I'm associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. In my professional life, I see patients, I teach trainees, and I do research in health care policy. This is plenary session. Plenary session is a

podcast at the intersection of medicine, oncology, and health policy. And you're listening to

season three on this week's episode. Okay, I wanted to record a brief little video about

the passing of Jose Pepe Baselga.

I was caught off guard to hear it this weekend, and I was, in fact, quite sad to hear it,

which might come as surprise to people who had followed the interactions I'd had with Dr. Bacelga over the years,

but you might not have known.

You know, we had crossed paths a Bacelga over the years, but you might not have known. We

had crossed paths a few more times than just the public stages. And I always had quite a great

deal of admiration for Bacelga. I literally, every time I saw him, I brought a smile to my face,

and we would always exchange some comments. And I learned a lot from from his work and I thought it might be helpful

at least to myself and maybe to others to talk a little bit about why I had such um such feelings

towards him. Um, so first I was really sad to hear that he passed away this weekend. He was only

61 years old, um, too young. Um, and I heard that the cause was CJD, which is very unfortunate.

I think the first time, you know, just to give listeners a sense, I think I've crossed

paths with Dr. Baselga a few times over the last decade. The first time I met him was, I think

in 2013 at the pertusimab ODAC. Of course, pertusimab was coming up for neoadjuvant approval.

And we knew that pertusimab in combination with transduzumab could generate a higher pathologic

complete response rate. But the FDA had never used path CR as a surrogate marker. And this

was the regulatory question. And Baselga, of course, was a speaker on behalf of Genentech to support the approval.

And I have no doubt that, you know, he was, and remains a, you know,

true believer that pertuzumab truly is an important drug in the adjuvant space.

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