Tag: Science Careers

Wanted: Collaborative life-scientists for drug discovery

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The golden age of drug discovery is over—at least for now. Over the past 10 years or so, a number of highly profitable drug patents have expired, and the blockbuster drugs of the 1990s have proved hard to replace. The pharmaceutical industry, which once made billions while transforming lives, has been forced to change how it operates. From megamergers and offshoring to the dramatic restructuring of R&D departments, pharma has become a very different employer.

In such a rapidly shifting industry, it’s hard for anyone to keep tabs on employment opportunities; weary and overwhelmed by experiments, graduate students and postdocs can find themselves completely overmatched.

It is easy to feel despondent when, in the United States alone, the pharmaceutical industry has shed more than 300,000 jobs since 2003, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Yet, even as redundancies continue to make headlines, there are openings for aspiring biotech and pharmaceutical scientists. Those opportunities, though, may not be where they used to be, nor are the risks, incentives, and demands early-career scientists face the same as those of a decade ago.

Who will emerge as the major drug discoverers in the next decade? How can you join their ranks? Science Careers asked scientists from industry and academia to offer tips for those looking to enter the job market in the coming years.

The new world of pharma

One of the most important drivers of change in the pharmaceutical industry was a wave of patent expirations that really picked up steam in 2010. Employees felt the impact of this a decade before, as companies anticipated the drop in profits. By the end of 2012, three dozen of the world’s top brand-name drugs had lost patent protection, paving the way for cheaper generic versions. The ensuing competition among drug companies is estimated to have eroded 90% of top drug companies’ annual U.S. sales.

To make up for these losses, the larger pharmaceutical companies sought savings by cutting R&D departments, which traditionally have eaten up a big chunk of the industry’s spending. To compensate, companies, in effect, outsourced early-stage research to smaller specialty pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

The result: Startups are the big recruiters now, says Richard Bozzato, a senior adviser for MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, Canada, a nonprofit that aims to foster relationships between scientists, venture capitalists, and industry. Oncology and neuroscience are the fields most actively hiring, he adds.

David Lowe, CEO of Aeglea BioTherapeutics, a 1-year-old company based in Austin, Texas, agrees that startups are where the jobs are. Lowe, who took his first job with Genentech in San Francisco, California, almost 30 years ago, when it was still a relatively small company, says that companies today have a different set of needs than when he began. Much of today’s drug discovery focuses on biologically sourced drugs as opposed to chemically synthesized ones.

Because many of the new drugs are ‘biologics,’ developed from the cells of microorganisms, plants, and animals, today’s industry is recruiting more life scientists. “No one studies entomology anymore,” but entomology could be hugely valuable to drug discovery, Lowe says.

Be collaborative and interdisciplinary

Another trend: Small companies are looking for collaborative scientists. Collaboration is “anathema to a lot of scientists, particularly young ones,” Lowe says. In graduate school, “you are supposed to be chief cook and bottle washer on all your own stuff.” Most graduate students are still trained to work independently, to value ownership of their work that leads to primary authorship on articles published in prestigious journals—a major key to success in academia. Scientists employed at large pharmaceutical companies traditionally worked in silos, too, but collaboration is essential for those who wish to thrive in the startup environment.

George Georgiou, a chemical engineer at the University of Texas, Austin, says that industry values people who are not just collaborative but who can work in an interdisciplinary way. Georgiou has mentored 48 students since setting up his lab in 1986; 12 of them have ended up in the industry. He attributes this success, in part, to running a diverse group including chemists, biochemists, molecular biologists, and chemical engineers—and encouraging his team to have a healthy respect for all those disciplines. The result, he hopes, is students who aren’t intimidated by other fields and who understand the jargon used in those fields.

Another advantage of working with such a mixed group is that students have a better understanding of the whole drug-development pipeline. “What I think distinguishes my students from those of other labs is that my students understand not just whether a molecule does what it is meant to do, but … how one might manufacture it,” Georgiou says.

Risks and incentives

Working in Georgiou’s lab was good preparation for industry, says Tom Van Blarcom, a research scientist with Rinat Laboratories in San Francisco, California. Van Blarcom earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 2008 and took a position at Rinat, which develops protein-based therapeutics; Rinat was acquired by Pfizer in 2006 but was allowed to keep operating as an independent biotechnology unit. Van Blarcom was attracted to industry because of the speed with which he could get things done there. “I don’t have to prepare my own media [or] pour my own plates,” he says, nor does teaching cut into his research time. Another advantage of industry, Van Blarcom says, is that young scientists there have access to a larger number of mentors.

Industry also means more diverse employment opportunities for scientists, including for two-scientist couples, as long as they’re willing to settle near a pharma-biotech hub. “I didn’t want to end up somewhere where there [was] only one fulfilling career option in town,” Van Blarcom says—so he and his partner, Diana Van Blarcom, settled in the San Francisco Bay area, a hotbed of pharma and biotech companies, including many startups.

That’s important because layoffs are part and parcel of the new pharmaceuticals industry. “It’s rare for someone to stay at the same company for their entire career,” Van Blarcom says, and there is security in knowing that there is probably another opportunity close by.

Got the skills, get the job

Van Blarcom believes that his interviewing technique helped him get the job. “When I showed up to my interview I was very prepared,” he says. He had read a handful of papers from each of the people he hoped to meet with, so he could converse about their work in more depth. Coming from Georgiou’s lab also helped him, he thinks, because Georgiou’s work is known for having a strong therapeutic bent: With 29 issued patents, more than half licensed to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, Georgiou has close ties with industry. “Having that track record from my [graduate adviser] definitely got my foot in the door,” Van Blarcom says.

At Rinat, Van Blarcom focuses on designing, building, and using sequence libraries to discover more effective antibodies. These libraries consist of sequences based on antibodies found in hundreds of people; Van Blarcom uses his bioinformatics knowledge to curate this data. “People could really have a leg-up on the competition if they are proficient in R or Perl,” he says. New sequencing technologies are generating so much data, he says, that automation is becoming essential, so suitable coding skills are becoming indispensable.

An implementation impulse

Van Blarcom says the decision to join Rinat instead of pursuing a university position was philosophical. He sees industry as a place to “produce tangible results,” while academia is more a breeding ground for big ideas. “I never thought I was the type of person that would come up with ground-breaking ideas; I was more of an implementer, so [industry] seemed to be … a natural fit for me.” In industry, he says, success is unlikely to come in the form of a Nature or Science paper but as a chance to develop a drug that ends up helping patients’ lives. “[That’s] ultimately a lot more powerful than another publication,” he says.

Working in the Community to Reduce Health Disparities

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Epidemiologist Kristi Allgood of the Sinai Urban Health Institute (SUHI) in Chicago, Illinois, is on a mission to get women to return to the hospital to follow up on suspicious mammograms. For 9 years, she has been involved in a community-based initiative that supports women whose health (and health care) is likely to be overlooked. Allgood and her SUHI colleagues are part of a growing movement across the United States that aims to reduce the nation’s health disparities by increasing the uptake of proven clinical treatments. Allgood, who is now 39, didn’t set out to focus on breast cancer research. After completing a master’s degree in public health from the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), she was recruited to SUHI to evaluate HIV education in Chicago’s Mount Sinai Hospital. But Steve Whitman, SUHI’s director, drafted her into a new initiative attempting to mitigate the racial gap in breast cancer survival in the city where she grew up. Funded since 2007, the Helping Her Live: Gaining Control of Breast Cancer project supports a team of community health care workers who help women in Chicago’s African-American and Hispanic communities navigate breast cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment. Women in these communities, as in the rest of the country, are chronically under or uninsured—and it’s common for women without insurance to fail to return for a follow-up biopsy. The reasons are complex, but mostly have to do with “fear, time, and money,” Allgood says. The upshot: Breast cancer in this population of women tends to be diagnosed at an advanced stage, making it difficult to treat and offering grimmer odds of survival. This breast cancer survival gap hasn’t always existed, explains Bijou Hunt, also an epidemiologist and Allgood’s colleague at SUHI. Twenty years ago, a woman’s race had little bearing on her chance of dying from the disease. Then, starting in the 1990s, white women began to benefit from numerous advances in treatment for breast cancer. African-American women didn’t share the gains. A study published in 2014—Hunt was the lead author—found that in Chicago between 2005 and 2009, African-American women with breast cancer were, on average, 48% more likely than their white counterparts to die from the disease. That makes Chicago the nation’s seventh deadliest city for black women with breast cancer, but the same pattern is seen in many other major U.S. cities. Each year, nationwide, the disparity equates to 1700 extra breast cancer deaths among African-American women, or about five per day. Figures like these motivated SUHI’s director to seek funding to help close the gap. In 2005, he secured half a million dollars to start a project that employed two hospital-based health care workers who would assist patients during procedures, provide guidance in the referral process, help physicians communicate medical concepts clearly, and sometimes “literally walk patients from place to place” at the hospital, Allgood says. When the Avon Foundation for Women provided an additional $1.95 million in 2007, the hospital-based program expanded into the community and took the name “Helping Her Live.” Allgood took a road trip to New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, where a project with similar aims had been running since the early 1990s. She returned to Chicago full of fresh ideas, ready to recruit and train additional health care workers who, in contrast to their hospital-based peers, would work out in the community. This story ties in with Science’s special issue on breast cancer.
Today, these community-based health care workers help women access routine breast screenings, and work to ease delays in test results and follow-ups. They attend community events, present workshops, and canvass women one-on-one to educate them about the reasons behind health disparities, how mammograms work, and how cancer is treated. Allgood describes them as compassionate, effective advocates and well-respected community members who understand the social issues facing the patients they serve. They are, Allgood says, the key to the project’s success. Having got the ball rolling, Allgood was charged, along with Hunt, with evaluating the hospital and community-based projects. The two epidemiologists assemble mammogram results, pathology reports, and clinicians’ suggested treatments, and they combine them with data collected in the community. They then go to work analyzing it. Last year, the project’s hospital-based workers saw more than 3000 patients and assisted them on 12,000 occasions in 50 distinct, documented ways. Over 3 years, the community-based health care workers responded to 5000 requests for help. It is too early to report whether the project is reducing mortality rates, Allgood says. Their analysis shows, however, that their programs are radically improving some interim metrics. Today, 95% of African-American women in the project’s target communities return for a checkup after a suspicious mammogram, up from 66% before the project began.

Wanted: teamwork, statistics, and a passion for social justice

Cancer geneticist Rick Kittles, whose work at UIC identifies genetic and environmental factors that lead to cancer health disparities, says that statistical savvy is important in the work that Allgood is doing—but that social savvy is important, too. Whitman echoes that sentiment: “Too many young people coming into the field of epidemiology … do not know enough about the world and how it works,” he says. The work is highly interdisciplinary and depends on effective communication among scientists, staff, doctors, and patients—as well as with funders and policymakers.

Fundraising, in fact, is one of the job’s biggest challenges. “We work tirelessly to either keep the funding or find new avenues to fund [our] programs,” Allgood says. Allgood, Hunt, and the other epidemiologists write reports for and make presentations to stakeholders who can influence the health policies adopted by the city government.

To get involved in health disparities work, one must, of course, have the basic credential: at least a master’s degree in public health, Whitman says. One needs hands-on experience in gathering, curating, and analysing data; statistics is becoming ever more important as the field becomes more data-driven.

Alongside such training, those pursuing this career should have a passion for social justice and be ready to think critically about how society-level decisions impact individual health, says Jennifer Orsi, a data analyst at Walgreens in Deerfield, Illinois, who previously worked as an epidemiologist at SUHI. An affinity for teamwork is also essential.

The SUHI team is growing. Right now, SUHI is recruiting a community health educator. Since Allgood joined SUHI, the number of epidemiologists has doubled. Each is waging war against a different disease: asthma, diabetes, and HIV, along with more complex conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and obesity. Many approaches are shared among projects. “We all work together to help each other,” Allgood says. “It is really nice to have that backup.”

Journal Editors Get Twitter-Savvy

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Science journal editors are the air traffic controllers of the science world. Their task is to guide reports of original research through a process of peer review and revision and deliver it quickly and clearly to its intended audience, all the while keeping an eye on what else is in the air. It’s a hard job, and the challenges are changing as a result of the Internet, the globalization of science, and social media. Here, we describe the challenges and changing roles of science journal editors as they embrace digital technologies in their efforts to stay abreast of scientific trends and controversies.

The traditional role of science journal editors

These days, most science journal editors earn a Ph.D. and do a postdoc before moving into scientific publishing. Once they’ve jumped the academic ship, they learn on the job. When they are not out visiting scientists or attending conferences to recruit new papers, they are in their offices reading scientific manuscripts and corresponding with authors, fellow editors, and current and potential reviewers.

Science Journal editors must be able to read and understand a scientific manuscript and form a preliminary opinion of its relevance. Then they must corral opinion on the novelty, rigor, and scientific interest of a reported new result. Reviewers’ opinions are often at odds, and their analyses may vary, so editors are charged with collecting, distilling, and evaluating those analyses. Science journal editors make recommendations—and sometimes a final decision—on whether or not to publish.

Once a paper is accepted, editors work with the authors to improve the manuscript and make the suggested revisions—a task that requires patience, interpersonal skills, and the ability to achieve consensus among opinionated scientists.

Science journal editors in the age of social media

Twenty years or so ago this process was managed mostly on paper, but over time it went electronic and—thanks largely to email and online manuscript submission systems—became quicker and more interactive. Now the role of science journal editors is changing again. As social media facilitates one-to-many interactions, editors are finding new ways to maintain their networks and eavesdrop on the scientific community. Twitter is emerging as the preferred tool among science journal editors for meeting the changing demands of their job.

Nicholas Wigginton, Science’s Ann Arbor, Michigan-based earth and environment editor, says that one of the biggest challenges for editors is “to keep in touch with new scientific communities” as science’s global reach expands. Wigginton employs Twitter to cultivate and maintain a network of potential reviewers in countries that once were poorly represented in academic journals but, because of significant improvements in the quality of their research, are attracting fresh attention.

By listening in on online conversations, editors also use Twitter to keep up with the latest news from their field. “[Twitter] is replacing the role of listening in to chatter in the hallways of conferences,” Wigginton says. Increasingly, researchers are tweeting the key points of their colleagues’ talks at scientific meetings. By following a meeting’s hashtag, editors can learn about new results and gauge the researchers’ responses without being in the room. Editors can’t be everywhere at once; even a major journal like Science has only about 30 editors, too few to make it to all of meetings and conferences that take place every year.

Jake Yeston, Science’s deputy editor for physical sciences, who is based in Washington D.C., says, however, that schlepping to a city and sitting in a room listening to science remains very much a part of his job as an editor. Twitter, he says, is useful but imperfect: The danger is that you’ll hear the most vocal people and miss what the broader community is saying. “You get a really good sense of what those 10 people think, but that isn’t what is happening in the field as a whole.”

Sacha Vignieri with her son Griffin Ream (left) and Sceloporus occidentalis (center of face).
Twitter is especially useful, Yeston says, for following high-profile flops. “It is kind of like jackals; when there is a paper that kind of looks like it is going south, then people attack it,” he says. Editors may have papers under review that rely on a published result; if it’s being called into question, editors need to know about it, he adds.

Yeston says he avoids tweeting about particular papers, because he assumes that, as a Science editor, he’s on stage: He worries he may give scientists the wrong impression about the types of papers he is interested in reviewing. But that doesn’t mean that editors wish to remain invisible; some use Twitter and other social media tools to build and maintain a public profile. Sacha Vignieri, Science’s Portland, Oregon-based ecology editor, says that many editors want to be accepted as scientists’ peers. By creating an online presence, they are better able to demonstrate their fluency in the areas they cover and show that they were once active researchers in those fields. The value of such an online presence remains a topic of ongoing discussion, she acknowledges, at Science and other journals.

Editors increasingly use social media to reach out beyond the usual specialist audiences. Editors are under increasing pressure to ensure that the science in their journal is accessible to nonspecialists, explains Michaela Handel, The Journal of Experimental Biology’s publishing editor, who is based in Cambridge, United Kingdom. She spends more time on public outreach today, she says, than she has at any other time during her 17 years as an editor. She uses Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for her outreach. “It’s a great way of telling our community what we are doing,” she says.

Focus on fundamentals

Despite the advantages it offers, Twitter hasn’t really changed the daily responsibilities of a journal editor, except around the edges. “I don’t think social media is really something people should be thinking about when they consider becoming an editor,” Vignieri says, although “it’s kind of an interesting add-on.” Applicants are not vetted on their social media skills, she adds.

What is still most necessary for aspiring editors is a broad and detailed knowledge of the field and the skills needed to refine a piece of scientific work and shepherd it through to publication. At its heart, scientific editing is still about publishing a field’s most interesting and influential papers, which means that reading, writing, and thinking about science are still at the core of the job, says Cell Stem Cell editor Deborah Sweet, who is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (She is also the publishing director at Cell Press.) Those activities are likely to remain the mainstay of the work scientific journal editors do, even as new technologies alter the job in significant ways. If mastering and practicing these skills is an attractive prospect, a career as a journal editor might be for you.

Profile: Jon Heras, Seeing Is Believing

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The cold sea fogs of Scotland have inspired many artists, but as a boy Jonathan Heras saw instead the North Sea oil fields and the prosperity they brought to his hometown of Aberdeen. So he became an engineer, earning a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. But today, he makes his living as a graphic artist, and although his art is not inspired by Scotland’s scenery, his renderings of science are no less vivid than its raw and boisterous coast.

“Getting things to look authentic is the real trick. You need to add dirt and imperfections”. — Jonathan Heras

From the science behind the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN, the European particle physics lab; to the construction of the Bloodhound SSC, a car capable of speeds above 1000 miles per hour; to a portrait of a microscopic bacteriophage that recently received an honorable mention in Science magazine’s Visualization Challenge, Heras’s illustrations and animations depict a wide range of scientific concepts.

Heras, now 30, first explored animation in his early 20s when he and a university friend, Ivan Vallejo, directed a satirical stop-motion movie called The Polos of Death. Recorded on location in a college dorm room, the film features the action figure Boba Fett, from Star Wars, battling to the death a tribe of bloodthirsty Polos — a peppermint sweet — set to a soundtrack of Burt Bacharach and the Bee Gees. The film was “just a bit of fun,” Heras says, but he enjoyed the process of animation because it required him to be meticulous — a skill he seems to possess naturally and one he came to rely on during his Ph.D.

During his graduate studies in Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Heras looked at the flow patterns of liquid and gas through a catalytic converter using magnetic resonance imaging. His research subject proved difficult to convey to an audience at conferences, so Heras made short animated films of his flow-pattern data. “People don’t always remember what you are doing in terms of your research, but they do seem to remember you as the guy with the flashy animation,” he says, laughing.

Heras found his graduate work “quite frustrating,” he says. “The graphics were much more rewarding.” And so in his spare time he took on side projects that relied on his creative hobby. In one project, he was commissioned to make a safety video for his department. “We were surprised at how sophisticated a film he turned out,” says Mick Mantle, a chemist at Cambridge. “It became compulsory viewing for all new engineering students.” Heras “was a very, very bright student,” Mantle says, “but he preferred the image analyses side of things.”

In spring 2006, a few months from the end of his Ph.D., Heras set up as a freelance illustrator under the name Equinox Graphics, specializing in scientific visualizations. “Working from home was quite a struggle; you find that you work all sorts of crazy hours. I often watched TV at 5 in the morning because that was when I was up and working.”

Within 3 years he had enough work to need help, so he enlisted the animation skills of his friend James Waldmeyer, whom he knew from his undergraduate days. In 2009, he and Waldmeyer moved out of Heras’s spare room and into new premises on the outskirts of Cambridge. Heras still likes his home comforts, though, and sometimes works in his slippers.

Heras’s work relies on large amounts of computer processing power. He splits his workload across a network of 10 computers; even so, a frame of animation can take an hour to process. “If you have 25 frames per second and a minute of animation, it quickly adds up,” he says. The cost of all that computing power adds up too, and that affects his bottom line. “I know I could definitely earn more as a chemical engineer, but I wouldn’t have the job satisfaction I have,” he says.

Heras believes that keeping his work varied is key to staying successful. “It would be easy to just churn out many of the same images, tweaked to suit a particular client, … but this would be boring.” Instead, Heras picks projects he knows little about. He has animated a BMX trick that explains the basic physics of flying through the air on a bike (for the 100th anniversary celebration of Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis papers in 2005); a short documentary for the European Space Agency’s mission to orbit the sun with a satellite; a clip of an operation in which a device was inserted into a human vein to prevent a serious blood clot; and many more.

Heras’s first step toward creating an image is to learn as much as possible about the subject. “We start by researching on Wikipedia, and then we go to more detailed and accurate sources to fine-tune our understanding,” he explains. “We try to make [the] gulf of knowledge between us and the scientists as small as possible.” Heras and his partner come up with ideas and then meet with the client. Once they agree on the scope of the work, the real work begins. “Some of the images take a week to create,” he says.

Heras says he relies on what he already knows about science. However, the work requires some artistic license. All illustrators have to make these sorts of calls, he explains: “filling in the colors, the textures, the speeds that things move.” Heras cites the award-winning animation called The Inner Life of the Cell, made by Harvard University to take its biology students on a journey through a cell’s microscopic world. “It’s an amazing visual,” Heras says, but the space inside a real cell “is jam-packed with all sorts of things that are buzzing around. … It is not this vacuous space where you can see everything clearly,” as it is in the video. The video’s illustrators chose to simplify the cell so that viewers could more easily see what’s going on. Sometimes, he says, such editorial decisions are necessary, but they can be hard to make.

On the other hand, scientific illustrators must always be careful to make sure things don’t look too clean and pure, Heras says. “Getting things to look authentic is the real trick,” he says. “You need to add dirt and imperfections.” Knowing how to do that takes time, especially if you are self-taught. Heras says he picked up tips like these — indeed, most of what he knows about the craft — by reading blogs and online forums.

After so many years of formal education, earning a living from skills learned online and picked up in a college dorm room might seem strange. He says he still hasn’t completely convinced his parents that his career choice is a good one. But he hopes that in time they’ll come around, since he’s making a living and creating interesting things. Just as in his illustrations, seeing is believing.

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