Sasha King: Changing the Face of Organ Transplant

Difference makers can bring about meaningful changes that affect people’s lives on different levels. Drawing on her MIT background and passion to make a difference in the lives of others, sasha king has led to a remarkable patient-centered approach to scientific innovation and commercial growth since joining careDx as the Head of Marketing†

Sasha’s passion for impacting patients’ lives has helped CareDx deliver a new standard of care for patients who have traded end-stage organ failure for a second chance at life with an organ transplant. She has also helped simplify patients’ daily lives by conducting home blood tests for immunocompromised transplant recipients during a global pandemic.

Together with her colleagues, Sasha launched new diagnostic products that improve care for patients with a donated heart, kidney, liver or lung, and patient-centric digital applications that help improve complex adherence.

Leading with innovation

Sasha states that CareDx is fully and exclusively dedicated to the care of transplant patients, focused on the transplantation of solid organs with an acute medical need. She notes, “We help people who have end-stage organ disease where a vital organ – their heart, their kidneys, their liver or their lung(s) – is failing and they need a new organ to survive. It is a patient population where transplantation works miracles and takes recipients from their worst medical condition to a new life.”

When CareDx was founded 20 years ago, it focused on new emerging technology and identifying the best match to the market based on the technology itself. The company looked at every place its patented gene expression diagnostics could have an impact. Early on, the company decided to focus on heart transplants, where there was a significant unmet medical need, and the products available were invasive and lagging indicators of heart rejection. CareDx was the first to introduce a non-invasive blood test to assess the health of transplanted organs.

Sasha mentions that eight years ago, around the time the company went public, the company’s former CEO, Peter Maag, put a firm stake in the ground and decided to focus solely on transplant patients. It wasn’t enough to offer a test to identify rejection. He wanted to expand his mission to help transplant recipients at every stage of their journey, pre- and post-transplant — from organ matching to waiting list support to post-transplant surveillance to adherence.

The company name was changed to CareDx, reviving the direction for the company. After launching AlloMap Heart, the world’s first non-invasive test to check immune system rest, it realized it needed to evaluate multiple dimensions of organ health. sasha shares, “We acquired the original intellectual property behind AlloSure, a tool that can measure donor DNA levels in a recipient’s body – an important metric to inform post-transplant care. Since then, CareDx has spent years researching and developing to clinically validate AlloSure for heart, kidney and lung transplantation.”

CareDx is now pushing new frontiers in multimodal diagnostics, combining gene expression testing with donor-derived cell-free DNA (dd-cfDNA) to give transplant physicians the earliest and most comprehensive picture of organ health after transplantation, enabling timely, tailored medical interventions possible if problems arise.

Dent the Universe

As the company grew and new products were introduced, Sasha worked with her team to build sales, marketing, customer service teams and support reimbursement to ensure AlloSure was readily available to all transplant patients. In contrast, previous solutions for transplant patients were either lagging indicators of organ damage or invasive biopsies. Sasha mentions, “We were able to introduce a completely new, advanced molecular tool that has been able to detect patients and clinicians early. If it weren’t for our solutions, you hear about patients who would take a completely different trajectory and may have lost their organs. It’s incredibly compelling when you think about the impact we’re having on transplantation.”

Embracing Technology

Sasha realized early on that the success of CareDx depended on a very high-quality personal service to support the logistics of blood collection and the generation of test reports. She understood that logistics should never hinder physicians’ ability to deploy next-generation, non-invasive, post-transplant devices. For example, CareDx has patient care managers who call patients and schedule their blood draws, simplifying the process for transplant recipients, their patient care team and suppliers.

With “RemoTrac”, a mobile bloodletting service, patients can take their blood at home. It became an essential service when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Sasha notes, “Transplant patients have weakened immune systems and are at greater risk of serious illness, so going to healthcare during a global pandemic is incredibly dangerous for them. They should be able to do their blood draws from home. Fortunately, we already had that service, but we have expanded it to support all patients during the height of the pandemic. The service has helped keep people safe, so only those who need to be in the doctor’s office with a serious problem get in.

Since CareDx’s inception, it has helped more than 80,000 transplant patients with its testing services. Webinars for patients are held twice a month and thousands of subscribers subscribe to their newsletter to stay informed about the science and the latest research. As a transplant company, CareDx plays an exciting role with its digital platform to bring transplant patients together so they can talk to each other, learn from each other and support each other.

The next big step

CareDx will monitor the health of cancer patients after receiving allogeneic cell therapies and stem cell transplantation. Sasha claims, “If you transplant someone else’s stem cells or bioengineer someone’s cells, that’s a form of blood or cell-based transplantation. You now have a cell with DNA that is not yours. This is an area where we specialize, so we are excited to apply our experience in organ transplantation and enter these new areas to provide our expertise to support our patients and that definition of transplant†

leave brilliance

Sasha advises aspiring entrepreneurs venturing into the marketing industry to take feedback effectively and feel comfortable turning and changing which can be a key factor for success. Sasha says, “I’ve seen people from many different backgrounds become successful in marketing. What they have in common is a growth mindset. That’s something I’m always looking for in my teams. In marketing, you have to feel comfortable and thrive in change.”

“I also think it is very important to follow your passions. At CareDx, we love to care for transplant patients. If you have a passion for your mission and a vision for change, you are well placed to switch to the kinds of strategies that will make you successful,” shut down Sasha.