Pharma Transition Immediately After Fellowship

Victoria Ebiana is a neurologist who completed a neuro-oncology fellowship and transitioned to the pharmaceutical industry immediately after her fellowship.  

Her interest in a career in the pharmaceutical industry was primed when a physician alum from her residency program visited for a career day and spoke about his work in the pharmaceutical industry.  Prior to his visit, she speaks of not knowing that physicians worked in the pharmaceutical industry and how she assumed it was only PhDs and other scientists.  After his talk, this career path became her goal and she shared this with mentors who helped position her to gain experience that would be important for the pharmaceutical industry.  

Early on she set her sights on clinical development with a goal to develop drugs for patients with brain tumors, specifically glioblastoma which was her research interest.  

She has now worked in Clinical Development in the pharmaceutical industry for three years.  She spent 2 years at Merck and has been with Amgen for the last year.  

At both companies, her roles have been in Clinical Development.  

Given she knew she wanted to follow a career path to the pharmaceutical industry, she gained experience in residency by sharing her goal with a mentor who helped her by providing institutional studies that needed to be published for her to transform into publications.  In fellowship, at a large cancer center, she encountered and cared for many patients on clinical trials and asked to be on the Institutional Review Board (IRB).  As an IRB member, she reviewed many different pharmaceutical trial protocols and learned about clinical research through that experience.  

Her first pharmaceutical role, at Merck, was the result of networking, finding a recruiter that focused on physicians and understood the pharma landscape regarding companies that were more or less willing to take physicians with little (or no) industry experience.  Prior to working with the recruiter, she recalls applying for many clinical development and even medical affairs roles that she “felt even remotely qualified for”.  

She transitioned to Amgen after re-connecting with the alum mentioned above.  She reached out to seek his advice regarding career development within the pharma industry and learn more about Amgen.  During their conversation, she learned about an opening at Amgen that she ultimately filled.  

Clinical Development roles and responsibilities very much depend on where in the life cycle (life cycle is a term used to describe where the drug is in the development pathway – meaning is it in early development, like phase 1 or 2, or later development, phase 3, or already marketed).  

The work is variable and “no day is the same”

For a drug in early development or maybe not even yet in human trials, there is work to be done on creating protocols and understanding the feasibility of conducting those protocols or trials.  

If you are supporting a clinical trial that is being conducted and has recruited patients into the trial, you spend more time doing “medical monitoring”.  Medical monitoring is reviewing the data being accumulated in the trial, looking for any data errors or potential safety signals, and making sure that the clinical protocol is being followed correctly by the clinical trial sites.  

Another time period that can be quite stressful is “database lock”.  During this time, when a trial is coming to an end, all of the data must be reviewed very carefully for every patient in the trial to insure it is all correct before the data is “locked” and no changes can be made.  After this, the data can be analyzed for efficacy and safety.  This is a critical step to ensure trial integrity and involves cross-functional team members and is typically completed on a tight timeline.  

Victoria shared her advice for physicians that are interested in pursuing a career in pharma:

Focus on your transferrable skills.

“Know that you have everything that you need”

There is no secret knowledge you need to be successful.  Your skills as a physician that have taught you to be a problem-solver are enough.  Your work ethic is also important.  These are transferrable skills that are needed for a role in the pharmaceutical industry.