For those who remember, I’m sort of the “scared straight” of this talk. I’m what happens if you don’t get funding. So I could be you. When I started, I had a full head of red hair and a red beard and I was about two inches taller.

So in any case, I come from the industry, although I’ve worked with David [Kupfer] and Alan [Schatzberg] and a number of other people over the years, so I have minor credibility, I think, still. And my title sort of reflects what industry’s like. I began in industry as a director doing CNS research at Upjohn, and I won’t go through my whole history because it’s somewhat nonlinear and I began with Halcion as my first drug, for those of you who remember Halcion, and now my purview encompasses not only clinical development but also business development, health economics and a rather large division of the Institute.

So one point to make about industry, which I’ll talk a little bit about, is that if you are stimulus bound like I am and like variety, it’s a good place to be. You can do a lot of things and learn a lot of things. But there are tradeoffs and I’ll go through those with you.

So I’m gonna talk about why pharma careers are at least something to consider. I’m not trying to recruit anybody but why they should at least be on your radar as a career opportunity and maybe why it shouldn’t be, depending on your nature; what the challenges are and, frankly, what the long-term opportunities are in pharma.

I think most people think of pharma as sort of, you know, the evil empire, you know, the dark side of the forest. Some of us were chatting about how the forest is transmuted in the more recent books, for those of you who read Star Wars.

But I think there’s a perceptive issue now with pharma, you know, that we’re bad guys or that – and I think – let me just ask – how many people think pharmaceutical companies are primarily unethical? And you can, you know, raise your hands if you think that. Okay. See, I think that’s a good question, okay?

How many people believe that academics are primarily ethical? Okay, good. All right. So we have no shared delusional systems that need to be pierced here. I think what we all should remember that we’re also basically primates and we all interact and then that – you know, I think there are good and bad eggs in every company and in every institution and even in the media.

So I think that for most people the pharmaceutical industry right now represents a sort of dark force and it really doesn’t. And I hope I can share some of my perspective with you.

Why should you leave academics? Well, there are a number of reasons, I think, when I made the decision and I had, you know, personal reasons as well, but there are a lot of issues in academics – and I’m not talking about the positives. I think you’re all aware of what the rewards are in academics. But there are features in academic life that are difficult to deal with.

You have to compete for money and one of the pivotal things in my career – some of you remember when Joe Lipinski came to me and said I had do one thing for the rest of my life, I thought, “I can’t do that.” And I didn’t like asking for money. I discovered I wasn’t – I didn’t like writing grants.

So something I learned about myself. I didn’t like asking for money. I like having money and giving money to other people and so that, to me, was one of these little mini-epiphanies that one goes through when you do this for a career.

The incentives to publish or the requirement to publish versus the requirement to just do research that’s interesting. I – you know, we have the opportunity to publish in industry. I don’t have to publish any longer. We fund research. We do things that are interesting to us. Other people do the work. I get to see the data.

You give up some of your ego with that as well, if you leave the industry, if you leave academics, you don’t publish as much but you get to do interesting research and you learn a lot of new things. So there’s that tension that you have.

The politics in a corporation are very different than in academics and I don’t need to tell all of you that; what politics are like. In a corporation, most people are busy enough that there’s no one in the organization who has nothing else to do but make your life miserable. That doesn’t happen in a corporation and, indeed, you tend to work as a team. You have a common goal and everyone has to pitch together. You have real benchmarks of what you need to accomplish.

We don’t really have competition for resources in the way that you do in academics. We basically have resources. We have to, you know, allocate them, decide how to use them and to use them in interest of our company.

But nonetheless, the competition for resources is very different than I think what you experience here. And, again, career security – I think you all know about this – even if you’re tenured in academics, there’s always that uncertainty of where your next funding is going to come from.

So, you know, from the standpoint of industry, there are some advantages to being in a big company or even a small company.

So why be in pharma? Internal resources. I mean we have lots of them and I think we can do lots of interesting things. We have access, in terms of what we do, it’s a team-based approach. We have to work to a common goal.

Now it’s true, however, that our goals are different than yours. We are not – although some companies like to say they are – we really are – we like to believe we’re science driven but, at the end of the day, our primary goal is to find and develop a product that can be used medically.

Now the beauty of what we think about an industry, since we consider ourselves the good guys, is that if something is to be commercially successful, it has to be useful. None of us really believe that if we give you a pen, you’re gonna use our product. I have to tell you that. This is a secret. We don’t really think you’ll do that and so we actually try to find products that are better and that have use and that we can market.

For us to market to physicians, there has to be like a grain of truth. I know it’s sometimes hard to believe that we think this but most of us are physicians, have been physicians, so we try to find things that are good and we work as a team to do that.

We have people – we hire people who are smart and we have access to lots of external support. Again, if we have a product that we want to develop, we have the resources typically, especially in large companies, and Forest is a reasonably large company, to do that.

Compensation is – I think it’s fair to say if you’re successful is good. The career security, I think arguably is probably better. We have our own aggravation and mishegaas in industry that’s different than what you have in academics but, overall, it’s a pretty good career path. And as I said earlier, there’s not a lot of passive aggressivity in pharmaceuticals. You have a benchmark. There are metrics upon which we’re judged. We have to succeed.

We don’t have the luxury, you know – if we have a failed study, you know, it’s an issue for us. It’s a big issue and for us, of course, if we have a product that fails, it’s not simply that – our own ego that’s at stake. There’ll be people who’ll be fired, families that don’t get supported, and a most of us who do this in a management standpoint, really take that very seriously.

This gets to the last line here, which is in pharmaceutical business, we manage and we don’t just administrate and there’s a big difference between this. I mean our job is not simply administrating resources and telling people how to manage their careers, which I know is very important. We actually have to manage people and their lives and their careers directly and we have the ability to impact people’s lives tangibly.

So, for example, you know, in every organization, people get fired, people get hired, people get promoted and so we actually do management. And so, if you’re interested in a management position versus administrative, that’s a reason to enter pharma.

If you want to run large groups of individuals and if you like that, I should say that it’s more – it’s sort of like family therapy and, many times, it’s like managing a dysfunctional family. And a lot of the skills you develop are translatable to other jobs and other areas but, nonetheless, if you want to learn to manage, pharma’s probably a good place to do it.

So, if we do – if you take on a large program and you decide you don’t want to hire the FTEs, full time equivalents, to do the study, they’ll hire an organization that does that research for you. Every pharmaceutical company, to some extent, uses CROs; some to a much lesser degree, such as Forest. We tend to use our own internal scientists. Other companies have 40 or 50% of their studies contracted out.

You should all know that there are other options and other career options beside academics and beside pharma. Biotech companies, for example, are a good place to sort of have a career, more uncertainty but more entrepreneurial. Potentially more reward and potentially much more downside.

Working at a biotech, you could find yourself out of a job immediately or you can find yourself quite wealthy. It just depends on what you do. Again, we could talk about that if you have questions. It’s an interesting career path. I’ve actually had some experience in that area and there are good and bad things about it.

FDA is a good place to think about, if you want to find an alternative, to work. FDA experience is invaluable. Drug development is the most regulated business right now in the country, probably I think without any caveat. FDA, of course, is the organization that regulates us.

Pharma probably accounts for arguably 10, 15% of the GDP so the FDA, in some sense, is the most powerful regulatory agency in the world in terms of basic economics. People who come out of FDA have good experience. They’re easy to hire. There are issues with the FDA, which I won’t go into, in terms of as a career path, but it is a great place to park yourself to learn research, research techniques, in the setting of drug development.

CROs, I mentioned, are companies that just conduct research on the behalf of other companies. It’s an interesting place to go. I think they tend to be very time sensitive. It’s more like working at a law firm, if you talk to people who work at CROs. But, if you’re interested in simply learning to run trials, it’s not a bad place to consider, and CME agencies and other sort of ancillary agencies that provide support to Pharma are other options that people can look at. I don’t have much to say about them. I think in this kind of room, most of you would not be interested in that type of approach or opportunity.

I should point out that in pharma in particular, when we hire people, we hire at different levels. So, you can go to pharma and basically be a scientist or a fellow and spend your career running studies and doing research within the confines of your corporate mandate, as it were, or you can choose a career path that takes you up into management and broadens your scope, leaving your therapeutic area behind and learning how to manage and run an organization.

To do that, it’s not necessary to have an MD or a PhD, and indeed many – and for example, in my shop, the woman who runs Lexapro is a statistician by training. The individual who runs Memantine, which is our drug for dementia, is a clinical pharmacologist. Every company is different in their biases about who they hire and who they promote, but by and large, if you’re smart and you’re talented, if you have a pharm PhD or an MD, you can succeed in pretty much any of these areas. I think my own bias is that pharma is probably a good place to go. Obviously, I’m there, so you should take what I say with a healthy grain of salt.

So, what are the challenges? Probably the biggest challenge in being in pharma when you first enter is that you have so much that you can do, and it’s distracting. When you walk into a large company and you’ve come from academics, which has happened to me, you have so many resources, so many things that you can do, you have to learn to focus. You have to learn really what your job is, which is what are you supposed to be doing in the pharmaceutical industry. The answer is what I said before. You should do good science, but it has to have a tangible goal. It has to have a goal, and again, that’s the hardest thing for many people to accept, which is, I have to do a study. I have to do research that in some ways benefits the company. If the company is well run, that will be good medicine. So, that’s the synergy that you hope for.

But, there are real challenges to working at a company. First, the culture is different. You have to manage your culture. Every company has a different corporate culture. Some are entrepreneurial. Some are quite rigid. We live in a very harsh regulatory environment. Ellen made a point earlier which is very important. E-mails are deadly. For us, it’s deadly for different reasons than it is maybe for you. But, e-mails are forever, and from us, we continually live in a regulatory environment that’s very harsh and a litigation environment that’s very harsh, and it’s part of our day to day lives, and we don’t have the ability – we can’t be sanctimonious. We can’t argue that we’re academics working for the greater good.

There are significant rules to what we do. We can’t run a study and change the end points. We can’t say, “This was our primary end point.” It doesn’t work, and then we do a secondary analysis and publish the secondary as a primary and make a discovery. We write an analysis plan at the beginning of a study, and if we don’t adhere to it, we can get dinged by the agency, by management, by lawyers. So, it’s a reasonably harsh environment in the standpoint of how we conduct rules, or studies rather.

I mentioned this earlier. Pharmaceutical companies are the new tobacco. We’re bad people, and it’s just the way of life right now. Anyone who has dealt with the media, you deal with it and understand why those perceptions are true, and most of us go by the old saying, “You can never stop people from saying bad things about you. You just have to make sure they’re not true.” So, you have to deal with the perception of pharma.

Management is a real challenge in the pharmaceutical industry. You have to know how to manage your bosses. You have to learn how to grow your own team, how to recruit people, maintain them and promote them, and you have to learn how to manage in a matrix organization. You may not own all your resources. You may have to work with biostatistics and learn how to negotiate to get what you need to conduct a study and finish it up on time. So, it’s very different than I think the life experience that you have in academics. So, again, if you want to learn, it’s the place to do it. But, these are significant challenges, and many people don’t like doing this. You can’t work in isolation in the industry. You really have to work as part of a team.

Long-term, basically the industry is good for one reason. It’s a nice career path, and if you’re lucky, and you’re successful, you can control a lot of resources, and frankly, many of us who do this like to believe we impact medicine more than we could if we were academics. We really believe that we make a difference in people’s lives. We really believe we are doing something good, and so we think we’re difference makers, and I think that’s really the goal to being – The reason you should be in pharmaceutical or even in academics is I think the desire to do something productive and tangible.

You do have an opportunity to impact public health. I guess as an example of some of the many studies that we do that are useful and scientifically interesting, and fortunately are also valuable to the company.

You can maintain ties to your academic researchers, and for those of you who speak Yiddish, there’s an old Jewish saying. “If you have money in your pocket, you’re handsome, and you sing good.” Basically, you will maintain ties with academics. When I joined the industry, I was amazed. I was one of the early members of my class who joined industry. I got a bowl full of bad from a lot of my friends, but within a number of months, we were all friends again. When you have access to funds, people like you. I have to tell you. But, you do maintain ties with your colleagues, and I still keep in touch with all my academic friends as well.

I think I have mentioned all of this. I think the bottom line is probably the most important. If you have a desire to do something other than academics, and you want to develop skills in business, law, regulatory and management, pharma is probably a better place to do it. If your goal is pure research, or your goal is sort of what you’re discussing here, it’s not the right place because at the end of the day, as much as you have the opportunity to do good things in pharmaceuticals, you have to comport to what the company wants to accomplish.