My career so far has by no means been a standard one. I have traversed big pharma, startups, software companies, virtual pharmas and I see this only continuing. I started out life as a clinical pharmacologist, a ‘bench’ scientist. In vitro drug metabolism was my focus initially and then I found computers and software could be my new test tube and my experiments took a whole new direction. I started to cover as many of the problems as I could in preclinical drug discovery that interested me. No longer focused on metabolism, I expanded into modeling transporters, ion channels, nuclear receptors and toxicity in general. Today these are still my interests. I am an eclectic scientific collaborator and wear several hats from collaborations director, senior consultant, book editor, editorial board member to mentor of students.
Let me explain a little. Eclectic according to my concise Oxford dictionary = deriving ideas, tastes, styles etc., from various sources. It was not always this way. I was always a scientific “loner” then I realized over a decade ago when I was in a big pharma that getting my hands on data (molecules and some related bioactivity) for modeling many of the toxicity related issues inside the company was not working. This was due to a one of number of reasons, 1. data hoarding, 2. politics, 3. supposed thinking that it could be bad from an FDA requirements perspective, 4. we were not generating the data in-house that I needed and 5. a poor centralized database. So I went outside the firewall and collaborated with academics to get the data I needed, modeled it then published everything. This “collaboration” opened my eyes and over the years these collaborators in turn suggested other collaborators and so on until, today a decade later I am now spending most of my “spare” time on collaborations. I have explored new areas and met some great people that would not have been possible if I remained a “scientific loner”. My plan is to use this blog to highlight some of these collaborations and the science and technologies behind them while explaining why they are important to me and the rest of the world. Scientific collaboration is perhaps more important now than at any time in the past with the difficulty in getting investor funding, obtaining government grants, and the dramatic reshaping of the pharmaceutical industry. Imagine..there are all these great scientists out there and many want your help, they want to collaborate. Go on give it a try. Collaborate.
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