What kind of person is attracted to the pharmaceuticals industry? While still relatively new, the pharmaceutical chemistry program at the University of Toronto has been drawing in students who are anxious to speak the different “languages” of medicinal fields. According to associate professor and current acting program director Dr. Heiko Heerklotz, it “should be attractive for people who want to learn and apply and contribute good interdisciplinary science to, ultimately, medical issues.”
Calling the pharmacist a link between the many aspects of the pharmaceuticals industry, Dr. Heerklotz explains that “pharmacists have become primarily active in the dispensing, prescription and supervision of drugs.” As a result of being the proverbial gate-keepers to medicinal drugs, he says, “pharmacy education must include a great deal of administrative and legal matters, skills to deal with patients, et cetera. In my view, the pharmaceutical chemist is required to fill the gap that has been created by this development. Drug discovery, development, and production have become an interdisciplinary effort of physical chemistry, organic chemistry, pharmacology, molecular biology and a grain of soft matter and chemical physics.” All of which, he says, should be the responsibility of the pharmaceutical chemist.
Dr. Heerklotz explains that understanding the many pieces of the pharmaceuticals machine “renders [the pharmacist] perfectly suited to coordinate and integrate an interdisciplinary research team and work in it in a broad variety of ways.”
As far as getting a high-profile research position in the industry — a typical goal, Dr. Heerklotz says, of the average student — a graduate will need a masters or PhD degree. Because the U of T program is still in its infancy (the specialist program began in 2005) the program coordinators have yet to see what positions have been taken by graduates. “Quite a few… graduates are actually in grad school now,” he explains. “However, since the first students graduated from this new program only a few years ago, few, maybe none, [have] had a chance to finish their PhD yet. That means it will take a few more years to assess the success of the graduates on the job market.”
Unfortunately, according to Christopher Walpole, executive director of medicinal chemistry at AstraZeneca Research and Development Montreal, job opportunities in Canada are limited when compared to those in the United States and Asia. However, he says, “there are attractive opportunities in Canada in pharma, biotech, and in contract research organizations, which provide pharmaceutical chemical synthesis, sometimes together with biological screening, to pharma companies.”
Most job opportunities tend to concentrate in the research-based pharmaceutical industry, he says, “both in major pharma and smaller biotechs, as opposed to the generic-drug industry which engages in little research. In Canada, the research-based pharmaceutical industry tends to be largely concentrated in Quebec. Medicinal chemistry requires a very highly educated workforce with most positions requiring PhDs or MScs.”
While getting these jobs often isn’t as simple as heading to the local career centre and checking out job postings, there is another way to get that foot in the door. “The co-op programs in several Canadian universities enable students to undertake a three to four month internship in drug-discovery research labs. This is a great opportunity for students to get real life experience [in the] industry and improve their chances of being recruited into medicinal chemistry.”
Catherine Chiu, president of the U of T Pharmaceutical Chemistry Student Union, recently finished a co-op, or Professional Experience Year as U of T calls it, with Bayer Inc. A useful experience, she says, as she’s still in touch with former colleagues, keeping her up to date with potential job opportunities. However if you choose not to apply for this optional internship, old fashioned networking within the school is the next best option. “Various professors… also have connections in the industry, so it may be possible to get recommended that way if you’ve worked for the professor in their laboratory for undergraduate or graduate research.”
While pharmaceutical chemistry may naturally seem geared toward left brain thinkers, Walpole praises the satisfaction of creative inventiveness that the job provides. He describes his fascination in the business with obvious enthusiasm. “Medicinal chemists design and create the molecular entity which ultimately becomes the drug substance… Medicinal chemists possess the multidimensional skill-set which is needed to understand and translate desired properties, defined by the profile of candidate drugs, to molecular structures which can then be physically created, using synthetic chemistry, to deliver this profile as innovative potential drugs.”
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