Valerie Cella has joined AstraZeneca as a US Oncology Commercial Leadership Associate with Enhertu Tumor Agnostic Marketing, part of the company’s Commercial Leadership Development Program (CLDP) based in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
About Valerie Cella
A registered nurse turned healthcare strategist, Cella brings a background spanning bedside pediatric cardiac care, civic engagement work, and MBA training in healthcare leadership to her new role in oncology marketing. In her first year of the program, she is focused on promoting Enhertu (fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki) to clinicians, following the therapy’s 2024 FDA approval as the first tumor-agnostic HER2-directed treatment for adults with previously treated, metastatic HER2-positive solid tumors. Enhertu is co-developed and co-commercialized by AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo.
Before joining AstraZeneca, Cella worked as a Clinic Registered Nurse at Duke University Health System and at PM Pediatric Care, and spent a summer as an MBA Summer Associate at Edwards Lifesciences, where she supported clinical marketing and stakeholder engagement for a medical device trial. Earlier in her career, she worked as a Registered Nurse in the pediatric cardiac care unit at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, where she led a Food Option Initiative that expanded dietary options for more than 1,000 families and helped raise safety compliance rates from 90% to 96%. She also founded The College Voter, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on civic engagement and voter registration on college campuses, which registered more than 100 new voters across four campuses.
Cella holds a Master of Business Administration from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where she was recognized as a Forté Fellow and served as a Healthcare Sector Management Fellow, and a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing from Emory University.
About AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca is a global, science-led biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development, manufacturing, and commercialization of medicines across oncology, biopharmaceuticals, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, respiratory and immunology, infectious disease, and rare disease. Its Commercial Leadership Development Program is a rotational program for MBA graduates that rotates participants across marketing, market access, commercial operations, insights and analytics, and strategy functions to build future leaders within the company’s US commercial organization.
