Roche's Genentech hires Gilead, Novartis alums for brand-new marketing roles

Roche’s biotech unit Genentech is making major moves in marketing for 2023 as it creates two new roles aimed at boosting engagement with patients and healthcare professionals.

First up is former Gilead Sciences staffer Erica Taylor, Ph.D., who becomes Genentech’s first-ever chief marketing officer. The Swiss cancer drug maker will tap Taylor for her “leading edge and innovative marketing capabilities,” Roche said in a release sent to Fierce Pharma Marketing, which it hopes will create a “world class marketing organization.”

Taylor becomes chief marketing officer as she moves over from being head of strategy and chief of staff for Roche’s Global Product Strategy team. She was previously at Gilead, where she led its U.S. commercial build-out of the launch for remdesivir, the first FDA-approved treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

And that’s not all. In another first for the company, Genentech has also hired Ozgun (Oz) Demir as its first head of digital marketing. Demir is being tasked with boosting the patient experience “by leading integrated digital transformation across the marketing organization, inclusive of portfolio, product and therapeutic area marketing,” Genentech said.

Demir comes to the company from digital pioneer Novartis, where he was most recently its director and head of digital strategy, oncology, having also served stints at both Bayer and Pfizer.

This comes as Roche and Genentech, not always the biggest names in drug marketing, have been ramping up their work in this space. This includes Genentech’s "SMA My Way" program, which in the fall ran a new fashion show for people with spinal muscular atrophy, a condition for which it markets Evrysdi.

Roche, which markets several lung cancer meds, also ran a new lung cancer screening campaign at the start of 2022 but with a twist, tapping the 1970s in a campaign designed to draw attention to older smokers to get their lungs checked.

“We boldly pursue solutions to some of the world’s most complex health challenges, and key to this mission is evolving how we communicate about our dynamic portfolio of products,” said Ashley Magargee, senior vice president and head of commercial portfolio at Genentech, in the release.

“Erica and Oz will transform our digital marketing capabilities at Genentech to provide an easier, faster and more seamless experience for customers and patients to access information about our products.”