Think about Pharma Posted on November 21, 2007 Alan F. Schatzberg (bio) outlines some benefits of pharma funding.

We talked a little bit about pharma today and they can be useful for investigator-initiated grants. I think they’re very, very helpful. They’re helpful because they also give money to organizations to provide grants like the APA that people compete for. They provide opportunities for people to have careers if they really want to do some very big time clinical or basic science and there are opportunities for dollars in terms of grants intramurally that can be helpful, and people need to think about pharma and there’s more going back and forth, I think between academia and pharma in the last decade or two and so it becomes a kind of a potential career for people.

There are people who are very excellent psychiatrists or MDs or MD/PhDs who have gone and worked for pharma and have had successful careers and published a lot and are quite distinguished. It is something for people to think about and something that can be a great deal of fun.

And so, why not be on the other side, on the funding side where the dollars are there to get the trial done rather than you’re having to apply for them. If you think about it, it’s the same bit of work, isn’t it, or a lot of it. So, and some of it may be very much the same, it may be a particular kind of drug you want.

The other thing is that sometimes people have an interesting idea of a particular novel kind of therapeutic and they may not be able, in fact, to get the study done other than to go to industry in terms of access to funds or patients, or whatever. Some of the new technology devices may be better handled by working in industry than by trying to do it by yourself in a single lab, so there are lots of reasons to go into [pharma].

There’s often a kind of negative connotation to big pharma or whatever, but you know, they’re a tremendous contributors to the field and without big pharma or biotech start ups we wouldn’t have new drugs. Academics can only go so far in terms of discovery and true drug development is extremely costly and requires a very, very different structure, so it’s something to think about.

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