About
Three pharma companies. Two cancer diagnoses. One practice built around the gap between them.
25 years at Roche, Sanofi, and Novartis. The story behind Penwood and the operator-strategist work it does.
Kenneth Bennett
Founder & Principal Advisor,
Penwood
I have spent my career closing the gap between clinical breakthroughs and the patients who need them. Not as a strategy consultant. As the person in the room who had to design it, build it, run it, and drive performance.
I started in pharma building things that did not exist yet. At Roche, that meant digital engagement tools, apps, and branded websites for launch and mature brands before most companies had a digital strategy. At Sanofi, it meant digital leadership across brands like Allegra, Lantus, Praluent, and Jevtana, running the US device business including IBGStar and MyDoseCoach, and leading large global programs. Each role was bigger. Each one taught me something the next one required.
I was recruited to Novartis. Over the next several years, I built a global marketing organization from the ground up, spanning Neuroscience, Oncology, Cardio-Renal-Metabolic, and Immunology across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. I oversaw multimillion-dollar marketing budgets and drove brand marketing performance for Kesimpta, Cosentyx, Entresto, and Kisqali through HCP activation, advanced segmentation, and personalized content, including pre-commercial and launch marketing readiness for a Rare Disease portfolio and a first-of-its-kind treatment in Immunology.
I also led Patient Solutions, where I built a patient experience program and developed the activation strategy that identified how and when patients are actually reachable through DTC, digital campaigns, and direct engagement. That meant overseeing everything from telemedicine channels and digital therapeutics to patient activation campaigns and AI-powered diagnostic tools across major markets. That work put me closer to the patient than most commercial leaders ever get.
I established an end-to-end marketing framework that embedded AI into 50% of our marketing operations and reduced operating costs by 20%.
That framework ran across 4 therapeutic areas, more than 10 brands, and over 20 indications. AI was embedded at the strategic and creative judgment points: message pressure testing, customer simulation, creative evaluation, and decision making. Every regulatory and compliance step remained human. Not as a pilot program or a working group. As the way the team actually ran. I am not describing a plan that almost happened. I am describing a thing that was built, operated, and measured against standardized KPIs across the enterprise.
I built all of that from scratch. The patient programs, the HCP marketing operation, the AI framework, and the KPIs that measured whether any of it worked. In under two years, we launched seven new brands and indication extensions, several supporting acquisitions and accelerated regulatory timelines. We delivered complete brand launches including campaigns, content, omnichannel orchestration, and field training modules, several times in under six months, and hit every launch milestone.
During my time at Novartis, in the fall of 2022, I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. I went through radiation and chemotherapy. I continued to lead, continued to perform, and kept it entirely private. Then the disease came back, and then surgery that removed the cancer but required me to rebuild physically and mentally.
That experience changed what I see when I look at a commercial plan. I sat across from physicians who were overwhelmed. Packed schedules. Technology fighting them at every step. EMR, portals, scheduling systems, none of it designed to help them think. They carried their decision trees in their heads, built from years of clinical experience. They thought about treatments by compound name, not brand name. They juggled what patients brought in from DTC advertising against what their own training and outcomes data told them. Science, outcomes, and quality of life were their north stars. Empathy was not optional.
I had spent my career building the campaigns and engagements those physicians were on the receiving end of. Sitting in that chair, I could see which parts of the system actually reached them and which parts were noise. That changes what you are willing to build.
In early 2025, Novartis restructured. Roles moved to Europe for legitimate organizational reasons. My position was part of that change.
What was harder was the timing. The transition landed while I was still rebuilding, with the health recovery, a career change, and the needs of a family member recovering from a stroke that same summer all converging at once. I decided not to treat it as a normal job search.
I have been on both sides now. The commercial side and the patient side. Every pharma or MedTech company I have ever worked with has said it is committed to patients. The good ones mean it. Helping those companies get the execution right is what I want to spend the next chapter doing, because the mission only matters if the commercial work holds.
As I spoke with biotech CEOs, pharma commercial leaders, and MedTech founders, the pattern was consistent: AI was on every roadmap and in almost no one's commercial operation. I built Penwood around that gap.
I help biopharma and MedTech companies commercialize health brands and compete with AI as the operating layer. I work with commercial and marketing leaders who need an operator, not a consultant. Someone who has built the systems, run the teams, and knows where strategy breaks in execution.
If you are preparing for a launch, rebuilding after one that underperformed, or trying to figure out what AI actually means for your commercial operation, that is the conversation I want to have.
Advisory and project engagements → Fractional CMO for biotech and MedTech → For Series B and growth-stage companies building commercial operations from scratch.
Proof