What do I do?
I am always working on projects for
two different clients at one time.
This is a challenge for time management, but creates a diversity of experiences
and opportunities. 50% of my work time goes for project A and 50%
goes to project B. The tasks I do vary
by project, but some of the activities I do most frequently include the
following. None of those are things I
would do without support and oversight from a more senior person on my project team.
- Lit review: Read lots of abstracts and articles in clinical journals and figure out the rate of specific complications for a range of surgical procedures or the precise criteria for when a drug is used.
- Primary research with experts: Identify key opinion leaders in a field of research, invite them to participate in a one on one phone interview or online survey, create the set of survey or interview questions and then administer the research instrument and synthesize the key findings.
- Pipeline pull: Access a database of drugs in development (not yet available to patients on the market to patients) and pull a list of all the drugs currently in clinical development for a specific indication (disease) and prioritize them based on a set of criteria developed by the team or the client
- Make slides. Lots and lots of PowerPoint slides. Sometimes with charts and graphs, sometimes with lots of bullet points. It’s easy to make a slide; it’s hard to make a good slide.
What are examples of projects?
A project is usually 6-12 weeks. A client enlists us to research and report
our recommendations based on a specific question. Here are some of the scenarios or questions I
have worked on:
- A company that makes tubes used for blood collection wanted to know if hospital pathology labs (where blood and urine and other diagnostic tests are run) were concerned about the volume of wasted blood they had to dispose of (removal and disposal of biologic waste is no small thing). The company was considering developing a new product – a tube for blood collection that would collect a lot less blood. We interviewed nurses, phlebotomists (blood-drawers) and pathology lab managers and technicians to understand how big of a problem the excess blood presented and provided a recommendation to our client based on everything we learned about biohazard waste disposal regulation and feedback from healthcare workers.
- A company that has a compound in late-stage clinical development wanted to acquire another compound that was in earlier stage development. Drugs take a very long time to develop and if a company does not have multiple drugs in multiple phases of development, they might launch a drug and not have another new drug for a decade. In that case, if your lead compound – the drug that is farthest along – is submitted to the FDA for review and is rejected, your company is in deep trouble (that’s not the technical term). Our client wanted to “fill the pipeline” so they could release a new product a few years later instead of 10. This is a huge trend in pharma and biotech. They did not have a specific compound or molecule in mind and asked us for recommendations. We evaluated a bunch of companies and compounds based on specific criteria and the amount of money our client could use to purchase a compound and prioritized a few targets, i.e., companies that had a compound in early stage development that might be willing to sell it to our client.
- A company with a drug used in the treatment of an acute condition is considering expanding the patient population which is a candidate for the drug. Before they undertake the clinical research and time necessary to do so, they asked us to find out how much of a commercial benefit (read: how much more money could they earn) if a wider number of patients were eligible for the drug. We did a lot of secondary research, meaning I read a ton of clinical literature on the treatment and we did a lot of primary research, meaning we interviewed physicians who treat these patients to see whether they would use the drug in more patients if they could.
