By Chris Lowe Kenilworth, NJ – On April 29, 2015 30 iJOBS participants from both Newark and New Brunswick campuses had the opportunity to tour Merck’s Kenilworth facility and learn from a panel of experts from many different walks throughout the company. The theme of the day was “A view from inside pharmaceutical development: perspective on career paths” and it certainly delivered on both counts. After arriving at the Kenilworth site, we were welcomed by Carrie Mackgraf, Discovery Program Lead, and given a brief overview of Merck and a 30,000 foot view of PhD careers in Pharma. She then handed things off to a panel of six scientists from diverse segments of Merck’s operations including Regulatory Affairs, Intellectual Property Management, Strategic Operations, and Scientific Writing to name a few. Melissa Tice kicked off the panel by describing what led her to a career in Regulatory Affairs and her role in guiding development and strategy for products navigating the FDA approval process. Karen Dingley followed and discussed her role as a Compound Leader in the Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, and Drug Metabolism department and how presenting her PhD work and networking at ACS meetings were critical to landing her jobs at Merck. Krupali Prevete explained what she does as a Program Coordinator, serving as an operational expert in non-clinical compound development. Tom Triolo changed things up as he talked about his non-traditional career progression through law school, working as a patent examiner, and ultimately his current role at Merck writing patent applications and monitoring Merck’s intellectual property as a patent lawyer. The panel continued with Linda Hunt, a Merck Science Writer who spoke on the skills that are required to be effective in her role, namely strong writing skills, a willingness to ghostwrite, and, where PhD’s specifically can have a strong impact, an ability to assimilate technical topics and processes and the capacity to communicate them clearly. Lastly, the panel wrapped up with Lena Hofer, a Program Manager in Biologics and Vaccines Strategic Operations, detailing her responsibilities managing partnerships with contract research organizations and manufacturing entities in support of Merck’s pipeline products.
“This is a great professional development opportunity that can be used to further one's career that I thought was non-existent at larger pharmaceutical companies.”
The diversity in job opportunities available to PhD level biomedical scientists and engineers within Merck alone was striking and extremely encouraging. Granted, Merck is no small company, listed at number 65 in the 2014 Fortune 500, but in just a little more than an hour we were able to see a broad spectrum of roles that PhDs can play across big pharma. Despite their diverse roles, all of the panelists agreed that your professional network is one of the most critical factors in finding a job. Several of the panelists made a point to mention that the reason they are at Merck is because of people they knew and met as a part of networking. It was also clear that internal networking within Merck is important and that Merck is a proponent of its employees crossing into different groups. “I was excited to learn that Merck has both formal and informal opportunities to work in different groups, for example by transitioning from a scientist position to a role in regulatory” said Kathryn Drzewiecki, an iJOBS participant and PhD student in Biomedical Engineering. “This is a great professional development opportunity that can be used to further one's career that I thought was non-existent at larger pharmaceutical companies.” The second phase of the visit offered the opportunity to tour the Kenilworth site’s bioprocessing pilot plant with Merck researchers Kristen O’Neil and Craig Seamans. The bioprocessing suite and the research groups it hosts, are primarily responsible for process scale up and development research as well as manufacturing of material to support clinical trials and toxicology studies. This suite features laboratory and development space for cell culture bioprocessing across multiple scales, from inoculum in shake flasks, to small scale culture in three liter bioreactors, all the way up to six hundred and fifty liter bioreactors. The facility also supports use of both traditional bioreactors as well as single use disposables across all scales and is also set up to accommodate expression from both bacterial and mammalian cells. Further, the suite boasts some impressive automated cell culture equipment, namely the Ambr systems, which can feed, sample, and maintain dozens of cultures according to specific user defined parameters all through sophistical robotics. The facility was impressive and it was exciting to be able to observe the day to day activities of pharma development for ourselves. Notably, many of the techniques, assays, and protocols utilized were not all that different from those you find in an academic cell culture lab, albeit at larger scales in many cases. The morning spent at Merck was an extremely enriching experience for all of us. The ability to gain candid inside perspectives from the panelists and to see for ourselves the technology and processes critical to pharmaceutical development was something that’s been unmatched in our doctoral or postdoctoral development. An enormous thank you to all of the people at Merck who worked to make this visit possible and who made their time and expertise available to us!