Slightly more interested in keeping track of his favorite bands than his studies in college, Eric Jensen still found a way to meld his longstanding interest in science with his English degree, ultimately ending up in the bio pharmaceutical world. When given the chance to choose something new, he stuck with the industry and continued amping up the impact. Find out how letting yourself get in the groove can often keep the jam going.
Although generally a good student, Eric Jensen wasn't particularly driven to excel in the classroom. Slightly more interested in keeping track of his favorite jam bands than his studies, he ditched a science track for an English major. Upon graduation, he still found a way to meld his longstanding interest in science with his English degree, ultimately ending up in advertising for the bio pharmaceutical world. When the time came to try pivoting, he went to business school. Yet when given the chance to choose something new, he stuck with the industry and through a stroke of fate ended up on the track to stay with the same company for nearly two decades. Only when the groove started feeling repetitive did he look elsewhere, finding a new way to amp up the impact.
In this episode, find out from Eric how letting yourself get in the groove can often keep the jam going.… on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Eric Jensen currently serves as Vice President, Head of Clinic Channel at Grail, where his team detects cancer early when it can best be treated and cured. Prior to his current role, he spent nearly two decades in a variety of positions at biotechnology giant Amgen. He lives with his family in the Columbus, Ohio area.
For another story about finding impact through early-stage therapies, listen to our episode with Drew Natenshon.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Eric Jensen: But I did find myself coming back to the biopharmaceutical industry. I've always found it to be unique and challenging. It's this intersection of science and health policy and regulation and all these different things come together to make it a really challenging business.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Slightly more interested in keeping track of his favorite bands than his studies in college, Eric Jensen still found a way to meld his longstanding interest in science with his English degree, ultimately ending up in the bio pharmaceutical world. When given the chance to choose something new, he stuck with the industry and continued amping up the impact. Find out how letting yourself get in the groove can often keep the jam going on today's Roads Taken, with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Eric Jensen, and we are going to talk about spanning disciplines and getting to where you're supposed to be using the skills that you have, and it's a delight to have you here. So thanks so much, Eric.
EJ: Thanks. Good to be here.
LJR: Alright. So I start these the same way with all of my guests asking two questions and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
EJ: So, Oh, gosh. That's kind of a difficult question, Leslie. [LJR: Yeah.] You know, I think in college I, it was kind of a, a transition point in my life. Obviously, anybody who, who goes to Dartmouth has been successful in a number of ways, otherwise, you wouldn't be there. I found myself probably less engaged academically, honestly. I did fine, but it wasn't my focus. I was more interested in my friends and going to see music, having a few parties, that sort of stuff. And the school was kind of secondary to that, if I'm being completely honest. You know, as I got out of school, I probably was still lingering in that phase a little bit. I moved down to New York, got my start in pharmaceutical advertising space, which was never something that I aspired to, but, you know, kind of found myself saying, okay, you know, it's, probably long enough to be in this phase. I need to think about where I'm gonna be going in my career and what do I wanna be. I get, and maybe I'm still figuring that out to be honest with you, but I did know that I certainly had some potential that I wanted to fulfill in terms of, you know, my leadership, in terms of doing something that was meaningful, in terms of, you know, contributing to the world.
LJR: Yeah. And you'd been an English major, right?
EJ: I was an English major, yeah, which in some ways is a reflection of what I just said. I always liked writing and reading. So that was kind of an easy path for me, I think. I thought I was gonna be a doctor at some point.
LJR: Oh.
EJ: Well, going into college, certainly thought I'm gonna be a doctor. I had a number of doctors in my family. My grandfather was a physician. But I think along the way found Okay. I didn't, I don't know that I want to continue going to school for another, you know, whatever it was at that point, 8, 10, 12 years, depending on what sort of specialty you wanted to be. [LJR: Yeah.] And so made the pivot to English pretty early along the way.
LJR: So put in a little time in the pre-med and then pivoted back.
EJ: Exactly. There, I always tell this story, there's this one class. I actually came into Dartmouth with some math credit. I'd done well on the BC calculus exam and I took, in my freshman fall, multi-variable calculus. It was Professor Williamson who, I don't wanna say he was old, but he was very old at that point and kind of sat at the board, scribbling really abstract equations and speaking and mumbling to himself toward the board. And that was the last math class I ever took. I had Professor Chauncey Loomis, who is my freshman fall English professor, who I absolutely adore. Ultimately took his Faulkner class and was probably the best class I ever took in my academic career. And so that was probably part of the story of saying, okay, do I really wanna go down this technical route? I'm kind of happy doing other things at Dartmouth and kind of enjoyed that more cerebral, kind of pondering the meaning of life and your, you know, your own dark corners as well. So that was probably part of the story as well.
LJR: Yeah. And so an advertising route seems kind of normal, logical for an English major. You said pharmaceutical advertising, which would make sense for a pre-med “I thought I wanted to be a doctor.” Did that happen? Did you make that happen or was it just kind of where you landed? Yeah, okay.
EJ: Yes. Yeah, So I often describe it that way. It was kind of a nice starting point in the career. I had done a lot of science. I come from a family of scientists. My brother's a PhD in college and evolution. My mom's a science teacher. So I always kind of enjoyed the sciences and of course loved the communication from my English major. So there was a nice intersection there. Now, to be completely honest, I also got, you know, family connections to help get me into that first job into the agency. So that also helped.
LJR: Well, it probably helped, yeah, get the position, but it also helped give you a visualization of something that could meld the two. Because I don't know about you, but at 22, I didn't know what the [EJ: I know] wealth of opportunities were out there to say that there was a healthcare focused advertising company like that. What, like how do you even know that happens?
EJ: Yeah, a hundred percent. And you know, honestly, we graduated, I was focused on going to Europe for the summer, which was a great decision. I never would take that decision back and had made the decision, okay, I'll come back, I'll live at home. I grew up on Long Island. I knew a number of my friends were gonna be living in New York. That was the destination. And sort of punted the decision till I got back. And at that point, focused on advertising and through the family connections. That's, that's where I got my, my first start.
LJR: Okay. I, I wanna hear about that, but I have to ask about the European interlude. You said you spent a lot of time at Dartmouth going to see music. Did you see a lot of good music in Europe?
EJ: Yeah. How? Well, no. Didn't you see a ton of good music in Europe? I, so I'd seen a number of Phish concerts, so back 92 to 96 days. I had a good friend at University of Vermont and a number of my friends at Dartmouth as well. We were kind of, Into that scene, we're seeing the Grateful Dead. We're seeing a, a number of Phish concerts. So I saw somewhere in, in the neighborhood of 30, 35 Phish concerts.
LJR: Oh my God. Wait, what are Phish fans called?
EJ: Phishheads, I guess.
LJR: Phish heads. Okay. You were a big..
EJ: Yeah, I was just so fun. Cause by the way, I haven't seen, well, I saw them once at Madison Square Garden not too long ago, but I haven't seen them in forever and a ton of people…
LJR: Well, you frontloaded it. I think you're okay.
EJ: I front loaded. I’m done.
LJR: You're still official.
EJ: That era’s over. But yeah, and you know, a number of my friends were Phi Delts as well. They had their spring concerts. So I saw those. In Europe, I did, I saw Phish in Amsterdam at the Milkweg, which was an interesting experience.
LJR: Okay.
EJ: I remember a ton of it. I don’t remember all of it.
LJR: Fair enough, fair enough.
EJ: No, I do remember that. It wasn't the best concert. That was the one we saw. But we made a circle around Europe. Started in London, went to Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, on the beach up in Spain, down to Rome, in Florence, and up to Switzerland and all the way up to Sweden at one point. So we, we had a great time.
LJR: Nice. And so when you came back, you were ready to kind of jump into New York life, probably also some good music and [EJ: For sure.] what did the idea of melding these two worlds really look like? Were you feeling like you were exercising both interests in that first…
EJ: Probably not. No. I mean, So, the advertising agency had two sort of wings. One was more traditional advertising, communication, vehicles, advertisements sort of stuff. And by the way, salesforce materials that the salesforce in a pharmaceutical company would use. And the other one was medical education. So that's really where I got my first in is ‘cuz my godfather was a prominent neurologist and he did a lot of work with the agency that was developing the medical education. That would be a CME program, for example. And so that was kind of my way in. But the first job was actually called Traffic, which was really the role to kind of carry the material through the different members of the team as it was being developed. It's just so funny. We've moved on so long where there was actually physical proofs and these sorts of things that I would carry to the copywriter, that I would carry to the account management team, and then to the art director, and then to the, you know, whatever the production, like I would actually be the one who would be the glue to kind of carry these projects physically around the office. We were still in the era by the way of the memo. Like I still remember, we'd get, you know, several of our communications would be done through Interoffice memo and it would come. It would land in your office and you'd pick up the memo and everybody'd read it, which is just classic. It's we're at the very end of that sort of era of business at that moment. And so that I always find that to be amusing.
LJR: Yeah. And actually you did parlay a couple of those experiences then into speaking of business, business school. [EJ: Correct.] What was the mindset there of where you thought that might take you as those lead to lots of pivots, sometimes…
EJ: Yeah. So five years in New York, great times. A lot of friends there got some good experience in, you know, the business world through the advertising agency. But you're really only at that moment seeing a small piece of the broader business puzzle. And I knew I didn't wanna be in that client service realm forever, honestly. Also, a lot of friends were making similar pivots, a number of them going to business school and onto other things, and it felt like, you know what? I don't want to kind of outstay my welcome sort of thing. That was a moment in time and so it felt like the right time to say, okay, I, you know, I don't wanna live in New York forever. I don't wanna be in this advertising agency realm for ever. So what next? Probably a good idea to go back to school at that moment, 27 years old, five years in the work world. Let's go back and finish the school. And I had a very different experience, by the way, at Anderson UCLA where I was, I found the academics so easy. It was so easy to focus on the academics, and I did super well there and still had a really great time. So obviously a little bit of maturity from five years in the work world and seeing the bigger picture of where I wanted to go and how the school fit and just wanting to do better.
LJR: Yeah. And I've actually, that's a refrain I've heard from a couple of people. And I do think, though, you probably soaked up more than you realized the first time around. And so you had such a good foundation of how to learn and all those things too.
EJ: Exactly. And I, I don't wanna say, because I was always a good student and I always happened, it just wasn't my, my focus. [LJR: Yeah.] You know, it wasn't like I, I wasn't driven by that, the way I was in high school and the way I was in business school. I just was driven by by other things. I still have this, I have this memory cuz I, you know, I was struggling at the end of college knowing what do I want to do? I've been going to school. I'm an English major. I'm smart, I know I've got potential to do any number of different things. Let me throw my hat into this consulting interview ring. And I remember having this interview and I think, I don't remember which confirm it was, but it was a great discussion with the guy. Had a good interview and at the end of it he was kind of, he kind of steered me away and he said, you know, I think you knew I wasn’t gonna get the job. Let's be clear. But he also wanted to convey some wisdom. I'm sure it was a Dartmouth alum. He said, you know, this is a tough road. Consulting is sounds really cool and sexy, but I've lost relationships. I've lost girlfriends in my life. I've lost friends. I'm on the road all the time. Do you really wanna do this? And I think he saw underneath and it was probably, it had a bigger impact than maybe even I knew at that point because I said, oh, I don't wanna do that. I'm not there yet. [LJR: Right.] Which is funny cause if you ask my wife now, she would say, I'm one of the hardest workers she knows. But at that moment I was not. I was just like, I was, that was, that wasn't me. I wasn't there yet.
LJR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Time changes people sometimes.
EJ: It sure does.
LJR: Yeah. All right, so business school, what did that afford you in terms of options, expanded horizons and thoughts about what was gonna be potential for you?
EJ: Yeah, you know, I think I went into business school thinking: Brand new start. I can go anywhere and do anything. And that's certainly true. But I did find myself coming back to the biopharmaceutical industry. I've always found it to be unique and challenging. It's this, Intersection of, you know, science and health policy and regulation and all these different things come together to make it a really challenging business experience.
And so I also have had the experience there to allow me to get the job in that field. And so the, you have your internship between your two years in business school. I ended up going to Pfizer in marketing. And was happy about that. I wanted to get back into the industry. I didn't really find any spark of interest to go a different route halfway through.
So I did this. I’m at Pfizer, so I'm at Pfizer in New York City at this point, right. So I'm coming back to New York. Living in New York, actually in a Dartmouth friend's apartment cuz he had an internship in London. So I'm here in New York and thinking, okay, well maybe I do come back to New York and, and live here. And in one of those strange twists of fate, Pfizer bought a large peer company called Pharmacia. At that point, at the very end of the summer. And as you can imagine, as they're trying to integrate these companies, they put a freeze on hiring anybody. And so that allowed me and opened me to interview with Amgen, which is a west coast, LA based biopharma company. So on the, you know, kind of more in the biotech space where it's pharma, at that point you would've thought of 'em as much more old school pharma. And that, that happened in the fall of my second year at school. And, you know, I always, it's interesting, you know, how many things have to go just right to land up where you are at any particular moment in life, and that's certainly one of those pivotal moments that got me to where I am right now.
LJR: Yeah. And because that had been a big chunk of your career, right? You spent with them many, many years.
EJ: Yeah. Yeah. So nine, 19 years. So just closed up a 19 year stint with Amgen. But you know, if, if that hadn't happened, you know, somebody at the top of Pfizer hadn't decided they wanted to make this acquisition at that particular moment in time, who knows, I might still be living in New York. I don't think so because, like I said earlier, I was driven at that point to not be in New York for the rest of my life. But who knows, right?
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. But then Ohio, that wasn't west coast, right? It became many, many years in Ohio.
EJ: Yeah. So now I'm, I moved here in 2015, so I, I was coming off of a period of time at Amgen where I was chief of staff for the head of the US business, and that afforded me some opportunity to, to take any number of different jobs. And it was determined as part of my development that I needed a larger leadership experience. I led smaller teams, you know, six, eight people. But you know, if I'm gonna progress my career, I needed to lead leaders and I'm a much larger organization, build culture, that sort of thing. And so they moved me out to lead the Great Lakes region of our oncology business, which was Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. And I had already at that point been married to a wonderful woman who's from Ohio, Columbus, Ohio. And so that was the decision we made. Although it was, it was kind of funny. She, we met at Amgen, so we met in our first week at Amgen, and then we kind of lived in California together. We built our family there. We had our two kids who went to Camp Amgen, so we'd all get in the car and go to Amgen and we would work and the kids would be at Camp Amgen and then we'd, you know, pick up and go home. At that moment, we decided she was gonna retire when, when I got this job, but we didn't know where we were gonna go. There were a number of different potential geographical options that were possible. And so I remember calling her, I think she was back in Ohio visiting her family, and I was following her and I said, Hey, guess what? We've got the Great Lakes region, we can move back to Columbus, Ohio. And, and I remember she said, I don't wanna move back to Ohio. I lived in Ohio my entire life. I do not wanna move back to Ohio. Which was a kind of funny first reaction, but actually has worked out incredibly well for us. We had a built in group of friends, a lovely community here. Her family's somewhat close, and so we've, we found a home here and now our kids are 12 and 14, soon to be 13 and 14, and part of the community here. Our roots are grown here. We're we're gonna get the kids through college and stay here. Yeah, it's an easy lifestyle. Coming, you know, living in New York, then LA you come here, there's a lot that you give up for sure. The weather's not good, but you know, the lifestyle's easy. It's, there's no traffic. I'm in and out for travel very easily. Obviously cost of living is great, all that sort of stuff.
LJR: Yeah. And I'm sure your family is very thankful to that Pfizer exec as well, because [EJ: Exactly.] a lot of dominoes fell in the right direction for that. Yeah. Awesome. So that is great. So now, more recently you made a pivot away from that home, but not home. Tell us where you are right now and what the future looks like for you.
EJ: Yeah, so I'm, I'm at a company called Grail. I joined in October of 2022. So like we talked about 19 years at Amgen, which was a great run. Amgen had always been very good to me. I had talked about three things. It's kind of the people, the products and the career runway that they provide you. And Amgen had checked all three: Really smart, aspirational people, products that I believed in, that I thought were, were good for the world, and then they kept moving me. I think I did have like 14 or 15 jobs in my 19 years at Amgen. So they kept moving me around to different challenges along this general management track. But, you know, never had thought that I would be at one company for my entire career. That doesn't really happen anymore these days. And honestly just felt like I was getting a little stale, revisiting the same sort of challenges and the same problems over and over again. And Amgen had grown so big. I joined in 2003. The company really had five products and maybe 4 billion in global sales, and had grown to 25 to 30 products and 26 billion in sales. So it was a great run to see it. But I, we had gotten to this point where it's just so hard to grow on that base, and we were getting into a world of financial engineering where you're just trying to, like, where do you move the forecast to? And you know, we need to cut opex here and, and just constant restructuring and really just trying to make the numbers work. And particularly at the level I was, that's the world I was living in. I just got tired of it. I wanted to build something and do something that had real meaning. I'm not saying that Amgen didn't, But.
LJR: Right. You were just moving farther from the impact part.
EJ: Exactly, exactly. So Grail came my way. A couple of Amgen guys who had moved over there, and it's in a field of screening technology. So our mission is to detect cancer earlier when it can still be cured. And we've got a screen test that's actually just commercially available as of a year and a half ago—coming up on two years—that detects up to 50 different types of cancers with a simple blood draw.
LJR: That's close to impact.
EJ: Yes. Yes. And it's a unique convergence of, you know, gene sequencing, which, you know, obviously beginning of the 2000s was only just becoming a reality, costing actually millions or tens of millions for each individual. Sequencing costs have come down. Obviously the technology's advanced, and then we also have machine learning and artificial intelligence that has burst onto the scene, and this actually uses those two technologies together to sequencing the blood, isolate DNA fragments in in the blood, and detect patterns of sequencing that would be consistent with actually tumor DNA in the blood. That's how it works, and I felt confident in hearing that, you know, it's probably a little bit of a bumpy road to any new technology adoption. It's not maybe gonna be as easy as it sounds. But on the other hand, we've come to a place where the only really way to bend the curve in terms of cancer outcomes is to detect earlier because the outcomes in a patient who've been, who've had their cancer detected at stage one and two is like 80, 90% five year survival; when it's at stage three and four, it's closer to 20% overall survival at five years. So, we need to move that detection earlier. And I'd come from the part of the industry, honestly, where billions and billions of dollars are being spent in late stage cancer therapeutics where the paradigm is, you know, you take a patient who's been through multiple lines of therapy, three, four lines of therapy. You put this new agent on top of a backbone of other treatments, and you try and get, you know what, like a six-month progression-free survival outcome in your study, which is a home run, right? And you know, I've got a personal story here as well. Unfortunately, I lost my mom to cancer in 2014. Wonderful woman. I'd lost my dad in 2004, kind of tragically. That was very sad. But she, you know, found the strength to kind of rebuild her life, rekindle relationships in her life that maybe had been lost, when she was with my dad. But unfortunately had kind of an a stroke of irony. The day my first son was born, we found out she had this rare tumor in her salivary gland, parotid gland tumor, which is, you know, not a good prognosis. And it had been misdiagnosed as a swollen lymph node. And by the time they figured out what it was, and she knew something was wrong. It was already metastasized to her spine and her hip. They gave her a year to survive. She lived six. And I always say like, thank God for the wonders of modern medicine and all that billions of dollars that's being spent that I just talked about. Because that gave us a chance to spend six great years with her. But it was too late. Right? And I'd said, she's a scientist. She would've loved this technology. She would've been an early adopter, and certainly she knew something was wrong. So if she could have gone and gotten a simple blood test to detect whether there was a, a cancer signal in her blood, she would've been all over that. And so, you know, I can't save her, but maybe I can save my wife. Maybe I can help myself or, you know, other friends. We actually had an advertisement, by the way, in the Dartmouth Alumni magazine in May. So you can check that out, which at its core is kind of an unbranded ad, but you know, the concept is curing cancer starts with detecting it and knowing you have it. [LJR: Yeah.] That's the idea we're after.
LJR: Awesome. Awesome. So what's your role in Grail at this point?
EJ: So we're really kind of a fledgling company. [The] commercial organization is two years old, had really started with a sales team and we're now moving into kind of more of a mature model. And so my role is to come in and lead our provider channel, so the team that is out engaging with customers and, you know, physicians, health systems trying to drive education demand for the product. And, you know, we're trying to move to it a place where lining up all the different cross-functional teams that are supporting it. So I'm kind of across the top of that, responsible for driving clinical demand in the provider segment of our business.
LJR: Got it. So if I were able to go back and or you were able to go back and get the young Eric's attention in between sets at the Phish concert or maybe not there…and say, Hey, look at this progression of a life that you have ahead of you. From the professional side to the personal side. What would, in a moment of clarity, what would he say?
EJ: You know, it's so hard because I don't really look at life that way. Just what we said it, you know, if I were to go back and say something, it would probably change the course of my life and, you know, I'm happy now and so sure. Are there things that probably I could have done better experiences, maybe I could have moved earlier in my career. Maybe I could have advanced faster. Sure, sure. I, you know, I give an example. I did chase promotions early in my career and from progressing up a marketing side of the organization, which, you know, at that point made sense. There were financial benefits. There were ego benefits of, of getting a title, but probably sent me sideways for a long period of time because of the leadership gap, you know, that I could have filled earlier and maybe that would've advanced me more quickly in my career. But, you know, I mean, you make the decisions you make with the best information you have in front of you at that moment. And I don't fault myself for any of those, so I don't, I don't, I have no regrets. I really don't.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And I don't even think I was asking it in the kind of thinking that you would. It was, it's almost like could he see that this would make sense?
EJ: Yeah. I probably was overly cerebral in, in general, in my life. And that's not just, you know, that's even with relationships and those sorts of things, I probably could have just let go and, and relax and let things come to you and be more confident and comfortable in my own skin. And that's been a maturation process over the years. I'm probably still working that out. I'm pretty much there now, but that certainly is one of those things. It's just kind of relax. Let it come to you.
LJR: Well, I'm sure lots of good things are gonna come to you, and it sounds like all the things that have thus far have been right on time and put you where you're supposed to be. So thanks so much for sharing all this, Eric. We really appreciate it.
EJ: Absolutely. It's been fun. I appreciate it.
LJR: That was Eric Jensen, Vice President, Head of Clinic Channel at Grail, where his team detects cancer early when it can best be treated and cured. Prior to his current role, he spent nearly two decades in a variety of positions at AmGen. He lives with his family in the Columbus, Ohio area.
I know those Phishheads are extremely loyal, but I'm not sure they can hold a candle to some of our Roads Taken fans. Quite a few of you have reached out to say that you never miss a show. And I know you binge listeners are out there, trying to catch up on the deep cuts you might have missed the first time around. Don't resort to bootlegs, though. You can find the full archive wherever you find your podcasts or at RoadsTakenShow.com, also the home of our show notes, transcripts, and the terrific then and now photos of all our guests. Thanks so much for supporting us and tune in again next time with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.