by Sam Whiting
Dr. Ellie Guardino dedicated her career to the search for personalized cancer therapies, a specialization she put to personal use after her own melanoma diagnosis in 2008.
Despite her diagnosis, Guardino lived for 13 years as she worked to extend the lives of her patients, even as the malignant mole on her back turned fatally aggressive. On Monday, April 19, she struggled to get up for a weekly 7 a.m. team Zoom meeting and was unable to catch her breath. She died three hours later in her bed in Menlo Park.
“Ellie put aside her own illness and said she was not giving in to it,” said her husband, Dr. Jeff Guardino, a Stanford cardiologist. “She never wanted her illness to define what she felt was her calling, which was to help others get through cancer.”
Guardino’s job title was vice president and global head of personalized health care, oncology at Genentech. She’d been recruited from the medical faculty at Stanford University for the primary purpose of getting Kadcyla, a drug to treat advanced breast cancer, to market.
Since its approval by the FDA in 2013, about 770,000 people have seen their cancer go into remission after receiving Kadcyla and two other drugs Guardino worked on, Herceptin and Perjeta. She oversaw hundreds of scientists at Genentech, which later merged with Roche, but still made sure her contract allowed her to continue treating patients as a volunteer on the clinical faculty at Stanford.
“Ellie was driven by her compassion and the strong connections that she had with patients,” said Dr. Heather Wakelee, division chief of oncology in the department of medicine at Stanford. Wakelee and Guardino started together as fellows in 2000 and stayed close for 20 years. “Ellie possessed the gift of waking up every day, even after her cancer diagnosis, full of abundant joy that she wanted to share with colleagues and patients.”
One of Guardino’s patients, Jenny Nolan Lyon, was 32 and planning her wedding when she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2004. She had to postpone the wedding, but Guardino convinced her that it would happen and that she would have kids, too.
“She took the time, every time, to make sure you understood every aspect of your treatment, your options, and were OK both physically and emotionally,” Lyon said. “She knew how to treat your cancer, but more importantly she knew how to gently guide you through a journey that would forever change you and your family.”
Three years into her treatment, Lyon was in remission and Guardino attended her wedding. When Lyon had a son, she named him Calan Ellington Lyon, who goes by Ellie, after his mother’s doctor.
Alice Elizabeth Grillo was born June 9, 1965, in San Francisco, where her father was an attorney. Ellie, as she was always known, was the fourth of five kids, and before she entered grade school the family moved from Marin County to Los Altos Hills. As practicing Catholics, the kids all attended St. Nicholas parish school.
Ellie attended Los Altos High School, where she was an officer for both the biology club and the hiking club, which meant climbing Mount Whitney one summer vacation.
A formative experience came when a friend’s brother, John, died of a brain tumor at 16. That set Guardino on a career path even before she had graduated from high school.
“Ellie told our family the week after John died that she wanted to do research to cure cancer,” said her older sister, Lynda Marren. “She set her path that day and never wavered.”
At UCLA, she was a double major in biology and psychology. Between graduation in 1987 and med school, she worked for three years in a campus laboratory under a doctoral candidate researching immune therapy in its earliest years.
At Georgetown University Medical School, Grillo was alphabetized next to Jeff Guardino in the cadaver lab. Cadavers, as it turns out, can be matchmakers.
“We spent 90 to 100 hours a week together as lab partners, learning all the aspects of the body,” Guardino said. “At the end of the night, I would slip the cadaver’s dentures into her lab coat pocket so she’d find them when she got home.”
In return, Grillo enlisted Guardino to be a dishwasher at her weekly lasagna feasts for 40 classmates crammed into her apartment. After medical school, Grillo stayed on to earn her doctor of medicine and philosophy degree in immunology. She and Guardino were married in San Francisco in 1997 and moved to Boston, where both conveniently had residencies at Harvard.
After that, they both gained positions at Stanford in June 2000 and arrived with two kids under two, Nick and Kate. Joey came along two years later.
Guardino had fair skin to go with her blond hair and blue eyes. She burned easily and had precancerous moles and freckles removed throughout her adolescence and adulthood.
“She was always nervous about it because she was told her entire life she was at high risk,” her husband said. In 2008, a mole on her back changed color and shape. A biopsy revealed it to be melanoma. She was already two years into treatment when she started at Genentech.
“She was motivated by her own diagnosis,” said David Marr, a colleague at Genentech. “Her expertise influenced not only her own company, but the FDA and other groups across the industry of cancer patient care. One of the biggest things about Ellie was how she never quit, even when she knew her time was limited.”
At one point, Guardino led a team of 100 scientists as head of safety science oncology. She later zeroed in on more specific technologies, heading a team of 15 that she was leading until the end. In November she was named one of the 2020 Fiercest Women in Life Sciences by the trade publication Fierce Pharma.
“She was tough,” Marr said. “There were meetings on our campus that I had to drive her to because she couldn’t walk. I don’t know how she did it.” She once even administered her own chemotherapy infusion in a hotel room in Bethesda, Md., where she was attending a four-day hearing to get a drug approved.
Two days before she died, Guardino was in her wheelchair and on the field for her son Joey’s last varsity football game at Sacred Heart Prep in Atherton. She was on oxygen but managed to make the “senior walk,” hand in hand with Joey in his uniform. She got a bigger cheer than any of the senior players “without a doubt,” her husband said.
Her other son, Nick, is carrying on the fight against cancer while doing stem cell research in a doctoral program at Stanford. Her daughter, Kate, started Elisabete, a clothing line named for her mother, in the family garage in Menlo Park.
The research carries on. Guardino’s dying wish was to endow the first faculty chair in melanoma at Stanford. Donations may be made to Stanford University in memory of Ellie Guardino, Stanford University, P.O. Box 20466, Stanford, CA 94309.
The people carry on, too. Ellie Lyon turns 7 on June 2.
“All of us will forever be in awe of everything Ellie did for us, did for science, how hard she fought her battle and somehow every day always managed to give us all more,” his mother said.
A small family funeral was held at St. Raymond’s Catholic Church in Menlo Park. At 7 p.m. on her birthday, June 9, a virtual version of the service will be shared on her memorial website, drellieguardino.com, starting with a Champagne toast.
Survivors include her husband of 24 years, Jeff, sons, Nick and Joey, and daughter, Kate, all of Menlo Park; mother, Angelyn Grillo of San Francisco; sisters, Cynthia Mansur of Richmond and Lynda Marren of Hillsborough; and brothers, Joe Grillo of Orinda and David Grillo of Studio City (Los Angeles County).