Ruth March

Ruth March, PhD, is Senior Vice-President of AstraZeneca’s Precision Medicine function.

As a member of the senior leadership team in AstraZeneca’s R&D Oncology group, I am accountable for delivering diagnostics across AstraZeneca’s R&D pipeline to match targeted medicines to those patients most likely to benefit.

I have led the development of AstraZeneca’s industry-leading capability in precision medicine, with 16 diagnostics launched linked to 4 AstraZeneca medicines since 2014. Precision medicine is now applied in >90% of AstraZeneca’s clinical pipeline across all main therapy areas - oncology, CVRM, and respiratory disease.

I have also led an innovative approach to diagnostics, developing technologies that best fit the patient’s care pathway. In addition, I have led over $185M investment with diagnostic partners, including molecular diagnostics, tissue diagnostics, next generation sequencing and point of care diagnostics.

With my team, I have pioneered many industry firsts:

• 1^st drug label extension based on circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA), making targeted therapy available to up to 40% of patients with lung cancer who cannot provide a solid tumour tissue sample
• 1^st laboratory based companion diagnostic (which detects thousands of mutations in BRCA genes classified through a diagnostic algorithm)
• 1^st companion diagnostic based on both ctDNA and tissue in the resistance setting
• 1^st point of care diagnostic approved in inflammation
• 1^st prototype point of care diagnostic for eosinophilic asthma

I am a genomics specialist with over 50 patents and publications and I drew on my extensive academic research to lead the first genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphism analysis of a safety biomarker to be submitted to the FDA.