Reshema Kemps-Polanco: Taking Risks for Greater Reward

Reshema Kemps-Polanco, executive vice president and chief commercial officer, Novartis US

As a child, Reshema Kemps-Polanco was taught by her family to work hard to understand the world around her and to figure out not just how things worked, but why they worked. While her mother initially tried to steer her toward a career in finance, Kemps-Polanco found herself drawn to work that focused on fixing people problems. While she was aware this path might involve taking more risks (something her parents were very willing to remind her of), she says she felt like this was always the right path for her. Now, 25 years later, she’s one of the leading voices in the healthcare industry.

In early 2025, the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) named Kemps-Polanco as its Woman of the Year. The prestigious title is awarded to a woman in the healthcare industry who has made a significant, positive impact on the industry. In her role as executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Novartis US, Kemps-Polanco is responsible for driving the growth of new medicines, ensuring patient access, and shaping future leaders in the industry.

According to Kemps-Polanco, her skill as a leader has less to do with what she brings to the table and more to do with what she’s able to bring out of the people that work for her. She says she aims to help people to understand their own passion and work in ways that aren’t just profitable for the company, but also improve the world around them in some way.

Championing equitable access

One of the driving goals of Kemps-Polanco’s career has been to actually help people who need it the most. As a leader in the pharmaceutical industry, this means that she has pushed the people around her to understand the need to improve access to medicine for all people.

“Novartis, being a global organization, is active in over 100 countries. It’s very important for us as we think about end-to-end clinical development and commercialization, to think about the non-clinical barriers patients will face,” she says. “Many times, those are dependent on things like geography, where they live in the world, and where they may live in the US. My team, from a commercial standpoint, comes in at the early stages of clinical trial design to give those inputs and insights around what will it take for the patient to access this medicine.”

Kemps-Polanco explains that the largest indicator of health disparity in the US is what zip code somebody lives in. For her, this means that she has learned to think about the specific patient communities that Novartis intends to serve with the medicines it is developing. Her team also considers what barriers might exist that prevent those patients from having timely access to those medicines.

“I’ll give you a couple of examples,” she says. “One of them is radioligand therapy (RLT), which is a technology where Novartis is leading in the industry. We are the only approved RLT in the prostate cancer space, and with a medicine that is truly personalized, you have five days from the time it is manufactured to get it to the patient. This started off in the academic medical centers, where patients are in very late stages of prostate cancer. Being able to get this from manufacturing to the patient within those five days, and making sure that all of the prerequisites that need to take place in terms of having the patient prepared are done, takes a very strong operational capacity.”

She continues, “Now, we are dedicated to researching and developing this technology in earlier stages of the disease. We believe the earlier you can treat the cancer and the medication is active, the better. But these patients are not just in Boston or New York; they are in all types of communities around the United States. One of our huge missions is to scale this technology in the community setting so that any patient who needs it does not have to travel hours, where they may not even have the transportation infrastructure to do that, to have an opportunity for innovative medicine.”

Kemps-Polanco cites Novartis’ 2025 Super Bowl ad as the second example. The commercial, she notes, wasn’t pushing a product. Instead, it promoted the importance for women to get screened for breast cancer. The ad was a launchpad for a larger Novartis campaign to educate people on the risks of cancer, the importance of screenings, and the risk of recurrence for certain types of breast cancers.

“We know only one-in-two eligible women are getting their mammograms,” she says. “That’s another example of how you can democratize outcomes. Ultimately, we can talk about access to medicine, but what we really want to do in this industry is democratize outcomes, meaning that wherever you find yourself, you have the same chance at a good and positive outcome. It shouldn’t matter whether it’s cancer or cardiovascular disease. You should have the same opportunities as someone who is at a higher socio-economic bracket, or who maybe find themselves closer to an academic medical center. It is my personal mission as a leader in this industry to do my part to help to democratize those outcomes and create access to better health outcomes for patients.”

Targeted vision

“A few years ago, we announced that we were going through a major transformation,” Kemps-Polanco tells Pharm Exec. “Prior to this change, we were a conglomerate. Since then, we changed our operating model and, more importantly, became a focused medicines company. We decided to focus on four core therapeutic areas: immunology; oncology; neuroscience; and cardio, renal, and metabolic. We want to build on our deep expertise in certain diseases in these core therapeutic areas, where we believe there is a right to win on behalf of patients.”

The change was centered on making sure that the company could really focus on specific treatments and finding ways to positively impact patients. By focusing on these four core areas, the company is able to develop a deep understanding of where it has good science and then determine ways to use that information to overcome non-clinical barriers.

This enables treatment pursuits on not just extending patients’ lives, but also finding ways to improve quality of life. According to Kemps-Polanco, this is the area where Novartis truly wants to be.

Understanding the world

When asked what inspired her to get into healthcare, Kemps-Polanco explains that she initially majored in finance in college before switching to social work. Many of her family members work in that area, including her mother and sister. She says that growing up, she was always told that if she truly wanted to understand how the world works, she needed to understand how money works.

While Kemps-Polanco is not working in finance, she finds that this advice still applies.

“I was much more interested in solving people problems, because if you think about how money flows, it’s still solving some type of people problem,” she says. “I come from a military family. My dad was a Marine, I had uncles that served in Vietnam. That was a great experience, having these educators in my family. When I think about healthcare, hindsight is 20/20. I look back on it, I always had this idea of servant-leadership, that your life is not just for yourself but is for others.”

She continues, “When I was first starting out, I did not categorize it this way. It was an unconscious confidence and I fell into it. When I look back on it, it’s so clear to me that I was destined for it. It was just my upbringing around the concept that my life should be a light to others, and it should be to impact others. To do that, you need whatever platform that you have. I didn’t always have this large platform, but I always was told that I had influence and power; that I might feel out of control, but I was never without my own power.”

That’s a lesson Kemps-Polanco carries with her to this day. She says that she tells her teams to work in the way they would if they were in the room with the patient. This keeps them focused on what the work is really about. Naturally, her teams must also meet the expectations of the shareholders and meet certain financial goals. This doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t also keep focused on the higher good that they are working toward: solving problems, extending lives, and ensuring treatment access to all those eligible.

‘Power’ boost

When asked about her leadership style, Kemps-Polanco reveals that she did something fun in preparation for the question. Prior to our discussion, she spoke with her team and asked them what they thought her style was. She says she wanted to see if there was any kind of misalignment in this area.

“I would say, in a nutshell, my superpower when it comes to leadership is helping others discover their own power,” she tells Pharm Exec. “Whether it’s with patients, my teams, leaders, my peers, there is nothing that gives me more gratification than watching that light go off. When that happens, a person or a team can accomplish more than they thought that they could. Their confidence builds and they are unstoppable. I always hold up my breast cancer team as an example, along with our spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) product team.”

SMA is the No. 1 genetic cause of infant mortality. “I’m really thankful that in the United States, we’ve got 99% newborn screening,” Kemps-Polanco adds. “It is imperative that we get to those babies ASAP.”

When collaborating with her teams, she says the desire to work toward the higher good is palpable. This focus allows them to stay centered on their mission, but also ensures that they understand the importance of maintaining a successful business. If they’re not able to hit their numbers, then they won’t be able to continue to work toward the broader, purpose-driven goals.

“The members of this team, they weren’t always like this,” she says. “They used to get nervous, and they would ask about expectations and things like that. But they broke past that. Now, they work to do something more than they thought they could and have higher ambitions on behalf of the patients. For me, I look at those teams and I say that they have discovered their own power. I give them what they need and then get out of their way. You do that one person, one leader, one team at a time, and then it multiplies its impact into the industry and patients.”