by Jim Gardner » Thu Oct 21, 2004 10:46 pm
Dave,
After 5+ years in medical writing at a large pharmaceutical company I decided to pursue a "lateral" opportunity and took a position in a department called Global Scientific and Business Intelligence (GSBI). I was doing very well in medical writing and was clearly on the management ladder, but I just could not imagine an entire career in medical writing. I wanted a position where I would learn more about my company and the industry. I also noticed that the few ex-writers who moved up into non-writing management positions had prior experience in other disciplines.
In my current position I am known internally as a Scientific Liaison (SL). However, my job duties are that of a competitive intelligence (CI) analyst. There are very few of these positions in the pharmaceutical industry and even fewer in biotech. Every SL in my department "lateralled" in from another position. There are currently 5 of us. Two have PharmD degrees, 1 has an RPH and an MBA, one has an engineering degree, and one (me) has a PhD. My boss has a scientific MS. I believe (from networking at the few CI conferences I've been to) that my dept is rather typical for a pharmaceutical company. CI practitioners come from a variety of educational backgrounds and usually lateral into CI from other disciplines.
So what exactly do I do? Well, it changes from week to week depending on the information needs of the many clients I serve. My job is to work with them (in Drug Discovery, Clinical, Regulatory, Marketing, Business Development, and Licensing & Acquisitions) and determine their needs. I bring these needs back to the information/search professionals in my department who then gather the information. I then organize, summarize, analyze, and communicate the information to the clients. All the information I deliver comes from external sources: biomedical literature, business news, patents, external industry and financial analysts' reports, clinical trial info, and information about drugs in development.
Among my most frequent client requests are pipeline analyses (charting all the drugs in development for a specific indication or that work via a specific mechanism of action) and reports on the competitive landscape for specific indications, mechanisms, or technologies. I regularly track competitors' drugs of interest (especially those we are considering for in-licensing) in news sources and pipeline databases. I cover (listen, summarize, and report) R&D and/or Science Day presentations that almost all the big pharmaceutical companies have once per year. I also am the content manager of a web portal page customized for the therapeutic area in which I work.
More information about CI can be found at the website of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (www.scip.org). I am not sure if this treatise is going to be of much help to anyone--as I pointed out above these jobs are scarce and there is no standard path for obtaining them. At the very least this is an example of the kind of interesting and unexpected opportunities that are available within the industry once you have experience and a track record of success.