Bob Purcell Leads the Way: Why Judgment Beats More Ideas
Bob Purcell: A Communicators Career at the Forefront of Healthcare Innovation
Bob Purcell has spent nearly three decades chasing the same idea, wherever it showed up. The internet. Genentech. Roche. Verily. Now the Parker Institute of Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), where he serves as Chief Communications Officer. Different jobs and technologies with one through line: Healthcare innovation and the practice of communicating it have always had the same ambition, expanding who gets access to a breakthrough.
In 2015, a persistent CEO gave her the chance to prove it from the inside. Cytokinetics was a muscle biology-focused biopharmaceutical company with a $6 stock, five Wall Street analysts, no approved products, and an ALS program whose fate was uncertain. Most communicators would have assessed the risk and passed. Diane assessed it and said yes. Eleven years later, the company has a market capitalization approaching $10 billion, more than twenty analysts, and iBob Purcell has spent nearly three decades chasing the same idea, wherever it showed up. The internet. Genentech. Roche. Verily. Now the Parker Institute of Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), where he serves as Chief Communications Officer. Different jobs and technologies with one through line: Healthcare innovation and the practice of communicating it have always had the same ambition, expanding who gets access to a breakthrough.
Purcell bet on the internet before most agencies understood what it was, arguing it wasn’t a new channel but a fundamental communications shift that allowed audiences everywhere to reach information instantaneously. At Genentech and Roche, he helped tell the story of medicines like Tecentriq, Rituxan and Avastin, so that patients could better understand the possibilities of treatment that hadn’t existed before. As personalized healthcare took hold, he pushed communications to explain a more complex idea: the right treatment for the right patient at the right time, not one drug for everyone. At Verily, he helped explain how data and AI could scale that precision faster than anyone expected.
Each stop taught him the same lessons from a new angle. Expanding access to breakthroughs is only meaningful if you clearly communicate the information behind them. But information without understanding is just noise. And, understanding without judgment about what’s worth funding, building or explaining is just motion. What’s harder is explaining why it matters.
“I can make you understand why you should care,” Purcell says of the part communications plays. That’s the real throughline, not the technology.
I sat down with Bob to talk about what a career at the convergence of technology and healthcare has taught him. What his newest vantage point might reveal about where innovation and the communication that supports it goes next is the more interesting question.
When Information Is Everywhere
Purcell landed in communications almost by accident. He started pre-med, became an English major and knew he wanted to stay close to science. He barely knew public relations existed when Ruder Finn offered him an internship before any of the sales jobs he was chasing came through.
His timing was fortuitous. The internet was arriving. Then, at GCI, Purcell’s interest in technology made him the young guy handed a vaguely defined challenge: “Hey kid, figure out if we can sell this to clients.” He became convinced the web was more than another communications channel and eventually moved to a web development company to get closer to the technology itself. Websites were still sufficiently novel that communications firms were trying to determine whether the internet was a new service, a new channel or something more fundamental. Purcell suspected it was the latter.
“The internet has played an outsized role in the world of communications,” he says. “People have access to information in a way they hadn’t before.”
Purcell has since watched social media dismantle more barriers between institutions and individuals and now sees AI as another “boundless opportunity” for communications and technology. But living through those revolutions has also taught him something about information: more isn’t necessarily better. Dr. Google was an early warning. Access to limitless information without understanding or impact can be a dangerous formula.
For communicators, that changes the job. When information was scarce, getting it into people’s hands had enormous value. When information is everywhere, judgment and meaning become more valuable.
Knowing What Matters
That distinction followed Purcell as he moved deeper into healthcare. Agency work taught him breadth; going in-house allowed him to “see things through.” A stint at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital put him closer to care delivery as well as the patient-care giver experience.
Genentech gave Purcell a front-row seat to what consequential innovation looks like. Medicines including Tecentriq, Rituxan and Avastin helped redefine cancer treatment and established a high bar for what the word “breakthrough” could mean.
“It’s really easy to tell cool stories of science and innovation,” Purcell says. “What’s more meaningful is when the science helps patients “live longer and feel better.”
One of the medicines he is proudest to have worked on, Ocrevus, reinforces the point. It wasn’t the first multiple sclerosis therapy. By his count, it was closer to the tenth or eleventh. It became an important treatment for patients. The lesson wasn’t that innovation had to be first. It had to matter.
At Roche, Purcell became increasingly interested in personalized healthcare and the intersection of therapeutics and diagnostics. Data looked like the missing piece, drawing him to Verily and its ambition to bring Silicon Valley technology to healthcare. There he learned another lesson: having a lot of innovation is not the same thing as knowing what to do with it. Verily was a “sandbox” of joint ventures, collaborations and ideas. Purcell was also there for what he calls the “great unwind,” when the organization had to narrow its focus around data and AI, close programs and make hard choices.
Innovation requires imagination. It also requires judgment. Working at Verily clarified something personal for Purcell. “I wanted to help get treatments to patients faster,” he says. Technology could be transformative and still feel surprisingly far from the patient.
When Good Science Gets Stuck
PICI has brought those lessons together in ways Purcell didn’t necessarily expect. The organization funds research across a predominantly U.S. based network of leading academic cancer centers and investigators. But unlike a traditional research nonprofit, PICI’s interest doesn’t end when the discovery is made. In some ways, that’s when its most unusual work begins.
A promising discovery can emerge from an academic lab and still go nowhere. Intellectual property has to be managed. The science may need to be de-risked. Founders may need experienced operators. Capital must be raised long before anyone knows whether the idea will work in a patient. The industry calls the gap the “valley of death.” “Does it languish on the lab floor because of a lack of willingness to move it forward?” Purcell asks.
PICI exists to step into that gap. Its model is purpose-built to do something different. It can curate intellectual property emerging from its scientific network, license that IP to an organization capable of advancing it, or help build a company around the science and bring in entrepreneurs and venture partners.
Purcell likens PICI to a production company. It doesn’t have to perform every role itself; it assembles the right people and resources to get something made. In this case, a medicine. The approach is especially relevant as Purcell sees venture investors becoming more reluctant to take the earliest scientific risks, often wanting clinical evidence before committing significant capital. That leaves an obvious question: who takes the risk required to get the science far enough for everyone else to become interested?
PICI can. “PICI is a real stopgap where traditional funding is becoming harder and harder to come by,” Purcell said.
Its nonprofit structure gives it a different appetite for risk, while its relationships with researchers mean it has often been close to the science from the beginning. Dispatch Bio, for example, grew from scientists collaborating through the PICI network around a new approach to attacking cancer cells. PICI helped bring the scientific founders together, build the company and assemble investors around it. It is a model that doesn’t fit comfortably into the usual categories. It isn’t simply research funding. It isn’t a venture fund. And it isn’t a biotech company. It is closer to applied innovation: find the science worth advancing, understand what stands in its way, and bring together what it needs to move.
The Communicator Moves Upstream
For Purcell, PICI has also sharpened his view of what communications can contribute to innovation.
“The days of being a media relations specialist are long gone,” he says. At PICI, communication sits across all stakeholders, researchers, donors, investors, partners and young companies, often before a traditional corporate story even exists. And Purcell sees a familiar problem among scientific founders. “The thing that progresses you invariably holds you back,” he says.
The depth of expertise required to make a scientific discovery can make it harder to step outside that discovery and explain its significance. A founder may understand every detail of the mechanism and still struggle to answer why an investor should invest, a partner should engage or a patient should someday care. That’s not a messaging problem at the end of innovation. It can determine whether innovation moves at all.
“I want to make sure the impact that science will have is clear,” Purcell said.
After a career spent watching information become ubiquitous, science become more precise and technology open possibilities once difficult to imagine, Purcell has landed somewhere that makes the role of judgment especially visible. PICI doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas. It recognizes which ideas deserve to move forward and then helps build a path for them. Perhaps that is the more interesting frontier: not finding breakthroughs, but knowing which ones are worth the fight.
Bob Purcell has spent a career getting close enough to innovation to understand the difference. And making sure the rest of us understand why we should care. That’s not a communications tactic. It’s the whole job.
