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You Don’t Have to Be a Scientist to Have a Life Sciences Career

06Jun
Green KeyPharma

Curious about a career in the life sciences industry, but you’re not a scientist? Don’t let that discourage you. Pharmaceutical companies have thousands of jobs in a variety of areas that don’t require biology or other science background.

The challenge for new entrants is that recruiters look for great talent with relevant experience. Whether you’re a recent or upcoming grad or a mid-career professional wanting to change industries, it’s up to you to show how your background and the experience you have is relevant. That means showing how your skills are transferable.

For example, an accountant who helped develop sales projections for a new product or territory may be able to demonstrate how the research and analysis that went into the report applies in the pharmaceutical world. A marketer with lead generation experience should explain how that can help the company expand sales.

Biospace has a primer on using skills and experience in other jobs to open career opportunities in the life sciences sector. The advice is basic, yet what it lacks in specifics it makes up for in providing direction.

For starters, Biospace counsels to “Get clear on what your transferable skills are.” As commonsense as that is, so many job seekers will start by simply updating an existing resume.

Don’t!

First become knowledgeable about the skills important to life sciences and pharmaceutical firms. Inventory the skills you’ve developed and your experience, listing those most relevant and transferable.

“Some suggestions to consider,” says the article, ”Are research, analysis, data analysis, problem solving, communication, time management, communication (written and verbal), planning, strategizing, team management, project management, presenting, conflict resolution, collaboration and training.”

Then “Come up with examples from your past job roles and duties.” Finally, “Include accomplishments that emphasize the transferable skills.”

Now you’re ready to revise your resume to highlight those skills and show how they will benefit the company.

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The Strateos lab in Menlo Park, California is as sophisticated as many research facilities and it becomes more so all the time. In partnership with Eli Lilly, Strateos opened a second robotic cloud laboratory in San Diego this year that focuses on the drug discovery process.

Lilly is using part of this Life Sciences Studio for its own projects. The remaining capacity is available to startups in the biosciences to run their own experiments, providing them access to tools and processes few of them can afford on their own.

Though still rare, fully robotic, remote laboratories like these are the future of drug development and biological research. They’re a clear sign of just how much laboratory automation has advanced. From the early days of handling routine and basic functions like blood chemistries, immunoassay and urinalysis, the cutting edge Life Sciences Studio can synthesize, test, and optimize compounds in pursuit of new drug therapies without human help.

At the Texas Medical Center (TMC) Innovation Institute in Houston, concept automation is tested and demonstrated. One of the most futuristic is YuMi, a product of ABB Robotics, which has a research hub there. Already in use in a handful of facilities, YuMi manages viral antigen testing in one lab and handles tissue, bone, and sterile fluid samples at another.

ABB predicts that by 2025, 60,000 nonsurgical robots, many as versatile as YuMi, will be in use in healthcare. 5,000 deployed in laboratories.

Robots,says Robin Felder, PhD, professor of pathology and associate director of clinical chemistry and toxicology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, are “beginning to swallow up all of the manual parts of the laboratory.”

But more than that, with the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, Ben Miles, PhD, head of product at Strateos, sees a future where the robots will analyze data to initiate experiments on their own.

We’re not there yet. But as Dr. Dean Ho, Provost’s chair professor of biomedical engineering at the National University of Singapore, said, “At some point, we’ll be able to move beyond solely relying on pre-existing data and algorithm training and prediction making.”

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An impaired immune system, age, obesity and underlying medical issues are the well-known risk factors for becoming seriously ill with COVID-19.

Genetics, too, play a role, helping to explain why some young and otherwise healthy individuals will have a severe reaction and most others don’t. Variants on one region of the human chromosome are behind the increased risk.

But why do some people have the variant and others don’t? Blame the Neanderthals of southern Europe.

Related genetic variants were previously linked to Neanderthals, so researchers sought to determine if the COVID variant did, too. Collaborating geneticists in Japan, Germany and Sweden traced the variant back 60,000 years to a time when modern day humans and Neanderthals co-existed and interbred.

In a paper published online by Nature, they reported that DNA recovered from a Neanderthal from southern Europe was found to have the variant. Two Neanderthals from Siberia and a Denisovan, another human species that ranged across Asia, did not.

“It is striking that the genetic heritage from Neanderthals has such tragic consequences during the current pandemic,” said Svante Pääbo, who leads the Human Evolutionary Genomics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University. Those carrying the variant have up to three times the risk of requiring mechanical ventilation.

Hugo Zeberg, first author of the paper and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Karolinska Institutet said, “Obviously, factors such as your age and other diseases you may have also affect how severely you are affected by the virus. But among genetic factors, this is the strongest one.”

Why this gene region is associated with a higher risk of a severe COVID reaction isn’t known. “This is something that we and others are now investigating as quickly as possible,” said Pääbo, in an account published on SciTechDaily.com.

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