Science With a Twist Podcast – Season 3 Episode 2: Enabling Healthier Communities

We've been able to move those trials into smaller communities in places where we actually can expand the reach of those trials and add more diverse populations into those trials, which again allows our customers to develop treatments that have a broad impact on what sometimes underrepresented groups.

Welcome to Science with a Twist, a podcast for curious people who enjoy exploring how science impacts our daily lives. From technology that helps the fight against COVID-19 to solutions that help clean the water we drink, it's all thanks to science. In each episode, members of the Thermo Fisher Scientific team talk to experts who are on the cutting edge of redefining how we exist. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to Science with a Twist, brought to you by Thermo Fisher Scientific, the world leader in serving science. I'm your host, Terry Summers. Today, our discussion about science and innovation will be a bit different. I'll be joined by two Thermo Fisher Scientific leaders who play key roles in sponsoring and overseeing many of the company's corporate social responsibility programs as we discuss the important topic of enabling health equity globally. Health equity is described as reaching a state in which everyone has a fair and just opportunity to reach their highest level of health. The topic is ingrained in Thermo Fisher's mission, which is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer. It's embedded in our day-to-day business, and it's part of what drives our approach to develop new innovative products and services. The world saw what the lack of health equity looked like during the global pandemic. For example, the COVID infection rate and deaths from the virus disproportionately impacted Black, Latinx, and Native American people. There was a shortage of crucial COVID tests and restrictions placed on testing, which all disproportionately impacted people of color. During today's podcast, we're going to explore Thermo Fisher's Healthier Communities initiative, which encompasses corporate and colleague programs dedicated to increasing health equity. Thermo Fisher approaches this effort by applying its influence to support three key stakeholder groups: communities, patients, and customers. As a world leader in serving science with unmatched capabilities across a diverse integrated portfolio, Thermo Fisher is uniquely positioned to support customers, governments, and health organizations in addressing health inequities. Our company-wide efforts to advance health equity include making diagnostic tests more accessible, recruiting more diverse patients in clinical trials, and helping communities build their capacity to address disease. So, to walk us through our discussion on health equity today, we are joined by Fred Lowery, Executive Vice President and President of Laboratory Products and BioProduction, and Marin Matias, Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability. Both of them play key roles in Thermo Fisher's Healthier Communities initiative. Fred Lowery and Marin Matias, welcome. Thank you for spending some time with us today.

Great to have you. Fred and Marin, can you both talk about your roles at Thermo Fisher and your experience with programs of sustainable impact, including what first sparked your passion for health equity?

So for me, I've not been here as long as Fred. I'm working on that. I actually joined in the height of the pandemic, so Terry, your opening was kind of really interesting for me to reflect on. In my current role, I basically get to work with experts all across our company to shape the way we think about not what we do but how we do it. So we're continually striving to really raise the bar on what it means to do business the right way and thinking about how we leverage our leadership for good. So it's taking our amazing mission and amplifying that to combat climate change, to strive in local communities, ensure the safety and quality of our products that ultimately serve patients and communities. So I feel very fortunate to do this work. I actually came into Thermo Fisher from a bit of a unique journey. I always had a passion for science and health, and in a lot of ways, this role is a full-circle moment for me because I started my career in the lab using Thermo Fisher technology and equipment every day. Then when I was looking to apply that path in a slightly different way, I ended up in nonprofit organizations and nongovernmental organizations, and they really thought about health in a much more comprehensive way than I had ever thought about before. It's through that work where I got to bring government and companies like Thermo Fisher and NGOs together to really drive societal change in a sustainable way that eventually led me to tackling the problem from a different vantage point, and that's what brought me here to Thermo Fisher.

Well, when it comes to health equity, how does Thermo Fisher choose its areas of interest, investment, and support?

You know, one thing that's really interesting when I hear Fred talk about sickle cell: I remember being in middle school, and I won't say the year, Fred, because I am old. So I remember being in middle school and going to school with a boy in my class who had sickle cell. He was in and out of class, and it was my first time sort of hearing about someone who had an illness where there really wasn't a lot that could be done for them. As I got older, of course, I understood that much more directly through my own experiences and with experiences of my friends. So I came here in 2020, and a few years later, for this preeclampsia test to get FDA approval to be used in the United States, I thought, gosh, I have friends who have suffered from preeclampsia or had scares. It just over my life, seeing how research has advanced and how more conditions, not just those that disproportionately impact African Americans but that disproportionately impact these groups that have been underrepresented in research, I think it's been wonderful to be at this company at this time when a lot of this change is not just happening but it's getting more visibility. Because I think with more visibility, other companies want to take a role, other organizations may want to play more of a leadership role, and I think together we can do a lot to make more change in a shorter period of time.

Sure. So in the opening of the call, you mentioned the three stakeholder groups that we focus on when we consider how we leverage our core capabilities to make an even further impact. If I take customers as the first example of these three groups, one of the ways we think about this is in terms of affordable and scalable health solutions that will allow our customers to reach as many people as possible, to really close those health gaps. So this includes how we can provide sustainable support in low- and middle-income countries. In terms of patients, there are so many ways that we support this, but one area that's coming into much sharper focus is really around advancing equity in clinical research. So how do we advocate for more equitable protocols? How do we recruit more diverse patients into clinical trials, really thinking about the populations that have been understudied, so that they'll have as many health solutions that are proven to really support them and their needs? And then in terms of communities, really amplifying our local impact, whether it's through capacity building for community organizations, training for local scientists and researchers, or even leveraging our workforce. Like Fred said, we have 120,000 colleagues who are really passionate about our mission, really passionate about health equity. They can volunteer and contribute their talent in very different ways in local communities, and Thermo Fisher is great about really encouraging that. So leveraging our colleagues and their desire to volunteer and give back in ways that really help to drive disease prevention and access to healthcare.

Marin, can you talk a little bit more about how Thermo Fisher leverages its global footprint to improve health equity in communities?

Sure. Yeah, so I'll stay with the point maybe on low- and middle-income countries because I think there are some interesting synergies there. Just in 2022, this is a good example: we launched our HIV drug resistance genotyping kit, HIVDR for short, which I probably will use. This is part of our Global Access program, which provides favorable pricing in certain low- and middle-income countries, which reduces barriers to access or works to reduce barriers to access. That was so important for this test because this test is a much more efficient way of determining the best course of HIV treatment for a patient, a process that could have taken a really long time without this test. We co-developed this drug resistance test with the US Centers for Disease Control. By enabling access to the kits, you take a place like Nigeria, for example, which currently accounts for nearly two million of the 39 million individuals across the world who have HIV. So we can make this test more accessible in places like that, we can drive better outcomes at younger ages. Last year on World AIDS Day in 2023, we announced a new partnership with an NGO called Project HOPE. This really ties in this focus of the HIVDR test. That collaboration is focused in Nigeria and really working to improve the well-being and treatment outcomes for young people living with HIV in Nigeria, which has the world's second largest HIV epidemic today. So I think there are ways that our products come into play here, ways that our Global Access program comes into play here, and how we can layer on community partnerships and collaborations to take the work further.

Fred, Marin just talked about the HIV test kits and our collaboration with others to make sure that that's the most effective program that we can provide. Can you talk a little bit more about how we collaborate with others to increase our impact?

I know both of you have talked about how our corporate social performance is a key part of why you love working at Thermo Fisher. But how do these initiatives help draw in and engage new colleagues?

I remember interviewing for my job here. One of my very first conversations was right around the time the Just Project was actually launching. So in our very first conversation, I got into this discussion. I thought, 'This is remarkable. Nobody was doing anything like that at that time.' So certainly it had an influence on me coming to the company. And like Fred, I've gotten lots of feedback from folks on different initiatives that have just spoken to them in different ways. I think it's one of the things today that job seekers look for. They want to understand what the position is that they're applying for, but the kind of traffic we get on any social media post or parts of our website that highlight this work and how we think about this work are heavily trafficked pages and content.

And I love that point about the culture. So a great example is we have really strengthened over the course of the last few years our collaborations with historically Black colleges and universities. But when you think about how people have then personally wanted to contribute to making those collaborations even stronger, our cybersecurity team is a great example of this. So we as a company have another community focus on STEM education: science, technology, engineering, math. How do we get more students exposed to it earlier? How do we get a more diverse set of students exposed to it earlier? Our cybersecurity team said, 'We really want to help highlight the T and E in STEM, technology and engineering.' They collaborated with a couple of our HBCUs and designed custom hackathon challenges and interactive forensic activities, things way above what I could explain to you today, but really using our technologies to take those into universities and work with the students and give them this real-world application of what they're learning in the classroom. That was very much self-motivated. That wasn't something somebody assigned them to do. This was something they really sort of brought together. They invested time in developing these initiatives, and now those are scalable programs. We can take them to other universities, we can adapt them and use them at different age ranges for our STEM education programming. I think it really speaks to the passion of our people and the enabling culture we have to really support that type of engagement in communities, but also just the endless opportunity to use skills and talents to give back.

Marin, you just mentioned STEM, and I know that Thermo Fisher has a very deep commitment to STEM programs. Can you talk about those and how they may contribute to healthier communities?

Absolutely. You know, when we think about the workforce in the life sciences space and we think about what we need to do more, to do better for society and really achieve our mission, it's really about driving innovation. We know that the more you can have diverse perspectives around the table, the more you can have one form of thinking challenging another form of thinking, you really can drive innovation. So for us, there is this commitment to bringing more talent, more minds, more diversity, different types of lived experiences into the life sciences base. There are certain populations that are really underrepresented in this sector, and we want to use our STEM education programs to make sure that students at a very early age, as early as middle school, really get exposed to different types of opportunities to work in these fields. You may grow up and your only touchpoint with somebody in STEM might be a doctor, if you're lucky enough to go to a doctor, and that may be your only understanding of what it means to work in the sciences. But there are so many applications for science, technology, engineering, and math. So it's really about exposing those students early, exposing them to all the different possibilities, and working through our colleagues to engage students in actual hands-on activities that help to bring that to light in a way that they can understand depending on where they are in their academic journey. In addition to collaborations with schools, we have a national partnership in the United States with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and that really helps us to reach more of those student populations that are still underrepresented in life science today. We also really believe in science competitions. How do you really raise the bar? How do you get students thinking about research very early? The Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge was just launched last year. It's a mouthful, I know, but the Junior Innovators Challenge is great. It reaches over 60,000 students across the United States and ultimately results in top 300 junior innovators that get narrowed down to a top 30 that engage in these collaborative challenges and are competing for that top spot based on research that starts at a school science fair. So we're really talking about how do we reach students in a lot of different ways to expose them to all of the potential of this space so that any student who wants to pursue a career or an academic journey in the life sciences not just knows what that means but really has the opportunity to do so.

And Africa's incredibly diverse. I think that's important to call out here because when you think about whether it's an initiative like the Junior Innovators Challenge or it's something significantly more robust like what Fred is talking about with this medical research center, the reality is when you have more people who are from a broader set of communities, challenges that those communities face get elevated faster, they get investigated and researched sooner. So I think the example that I gave at the top of the call around sickle cell, a great example that has garnered more visibility and awareness over time and has gotten us to where we are today, but the idea would be that if you have more people around the table, these things don't take as long. They get prioritized, they get funded. So that's how it all comes back around to advancing healthier communities and really health equity. That's why it's so critical to keep this dual focus on how do we invest in closing those health disparities and health gaps and also continue to build a future workforce in this space that's going to prioritize that.

Thermo Fisher just recently released its corporate social responsibility report, and it appears that having a desire to make a difference and positively impact communities in the world at large is something shared by many of Thermo Fisher's 120,000 global employees. Would you both agree?

Can you talk a little bit about what our employees are doing through individual contributions, volunteering their time, and through donations, how they've made a difference?

It would be great to wrap up today with a preview of what's to come. So what else is Thermo Fisher already working on, and what do we see as opportunities globally where we can have a real impact to drive health equity and healthier communities?

And those are perfect initiatives, I think, as part of our wrap-up today. So thanks for that, Fred. It really reinforces how we are not just thinking about this work but again, how we're advancing the mission and really looking to push ourselves to do that in new ways and different ways and really make progress and really make an impact. And Marin, if people want to learn more about the programs we talked about today and other initiatives, they can visit thermofisher.com/CSR to see the corporate social responsibility report, correct?

Correct. They can, and there's lots of great content there within the report as well as on the website and on our YouTube channel as well.

Well, Fred and Marin, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Terry.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Science with a Twist. This show is brought to you by Thermo Fisher Scientific, the world leader in serving science. If you enjoyed this episode, then follow Science with a Twist wherever you get your favorite podcast.