I work for Agouron Pharmaceutical, Inc. as a research scientists in the Research Pharmacology Department, not far from the beach in San Diego, California. Agouron develops drugs to fight cancer, AIDS and other serious diseases by using an approach to rational drug design based on the structure of proteins that play key roles in human disease.
People in my department are responsible for characterizing how a chemical compound acts in cells and in animals. The goal is to predict how effective it will be in people, and what the side effects will be for people. I work mostly on anti-cancer projects, although I have also worked a bit on our HIV protease inhibitor, Viracept, my company’s first drug on the market. I work at an early stage of the drug development process, in which the biological experiments done in my department frequently help us choose which chemical compound we should try to turn into a drug. In my department we do in vitro experiments (on cells that grow in an incubator) to ask questions like How well does this compound kill cancer cells? Does it work by the principle we expect? What types of cancer cells is it most effective against? How well does it work in combination with other cancer drugs? We also do in vivo (animal) experiments to learn whether a compound can also work in a body.
My work consists of three types of tasks: mathematical modeling and simulation, analysis of experimental data, and mathematical and statistical support.
I tend to work alone a bit more than most of my colleagues and with others much more than if I were a research mathematician. Most of the people I work with are pharmacologists and virologists, people who look at disease and drug effects in cells and in animals. I work mostly with people who have some sort of pharmacology, toxicology or virology Ph.D. - the ones who generally plan the experiments and decide what the results say. I also work with the people who more directly produce the data (who have Bachelors or Masters degrees in a biological science), especially if I am analyzing their results.
I am working in an area that has not had much mathematics applied to it, except for some basic statistics. From what I can tell, there are not too many people like me in the pharmaceutical industry. However, I keep hearing that I am on the cutting edge, so there may be more people like me in the future.
More specifically about the work I do, I get to do a lot of different things. I am learning new things all the time, eg, new methods of analysis to assess whether we should start using them, the regulation of particular intracellular metabolic pathways so that I can model them, or how to perform cell experiments so that I can track down sources of experimental variability.
I have been with Agouron for a little over three years. My boss at the time wanted someone to take over the mathematical modeling he had been doing. He could not find any biologists with the requisite mathematical skills, so he hired me. He thought it would be easier for him to teach me the biology than for him to teach the mathematics to a biologist. He hired me as a post-doc, a common first position post-Ph.D in the lab sciences. I have since been promoted to a permanent position as a research scientist.
My decision to seek a job in industry came out of desperation. Like everyone else I knew in graduate school, I started graduate school expecting to become a research mathematician working at a college or university. I got my Ph.D. during the recession when there were a lot fewer academic entry-level positions than there were Ph.D.s chasing those positions. I had arranged a post-doc position in an academic lab in which I would model HIV infection, but it fell through due to a grant being cut. I decided to try to break into an industry that had a better financial outlook than academia. I then beefed up my computational skills with artificial intelligence techniques while trying to figure out where else my skills would be applicable. Bio-tech and pharmaceuticals were growth industries in San Diego, and I liked the idea of working on something that would help people.
I was invited to apply for this position because I had sent out letters requesting informational interviews to most of the local bio-tech companies. After I decided to try to sell myself to industry, I went to the library and looked up research papers about how the computing techniques I knew had been applied to drug development and medical devices. I researched the companies, as best I could, to find out what types of products they were developing. I tailored my letters accordingly, so that I would mention, eg, how mathematics and computing were useful in genetics if they were a genetics company. I tried to be as specific as possible, to show them that I had some idea what their business was about. The vice-president of Research and Development at Agouron got my letter around the time he began thinking of having someone else take over the modeling he was doing.
I have a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego. My dissertation was about using combinatorial techniques to compare graph-theoretic algorithms.
None of the courses I took in graduate school were directly applicable to the work I do now. Most of the mathematics I use involves modeling and simulation, numerical methods, analysis of algorithms, and statistics. I took no courses in any of these areas in graduate school, and only took one plug-and-chug statistics class as an undergraduate. One time I helped the computational chemists at Agouron find an algorithm to code that would solve what was essentially a graph theory problem, which was fun because my dissertation was about graph-theoretic algorithms.
Having said that my course work was not applicable to my job, I also want to say that I use my mathematical training all the time. I can learn, eg, the statistics needed to implement a new technique much more quickly than can my colleagues. I have helped my colleagues extract more quantitative information from experiments than they had been. I have much stronger deductive reasoning skills than many others. The perspective I bring to problems we are trying to solve is radically different from that of my colleagues, and it helps us hone our understanding so we can plan better experiments and get more and better information from them.
In terms of specific advice to students who may be interested in industry, I have the following to say:
As there seem to be so few mathematicians working for pharmaceutical companies, I cannot generalize about what other types of courses students should take except to say that if you don’t know anything about an area of research, you can’t know how mathematics can be used to solve its problems. My first task when I was hired at Agouron was to learn the first 300 pages of a basic biochemistry textbook so that I could understand the 10 pages in the book that described some of the basic information for a large modeling and simulation project. I have learned a lot of pharmacology. I have also had to learn a little chemistry, molecular biology, and basic lab techniques.
Seperately, I've included information about mathematical issues in drug development and some hot areas of employment suitable for graduate and undergraduate mathematics students .
There is still a lot of variation about how well women are treated in industry. Before being hired I had heard that Agouron hires and promotes women fairly. Some companies that still have an old boys network do not value their female employees. It is possible to find out a company’s reputation before being hired. At the very least, looking around during an interview can give you an idea of the proportion of female executives.
I love my job. My company believes in hiring good people and treating them well. I am proud of what I do - I work on developing drugs to fight cancer and I have worked on our drug to fight AIDS. As much fun as I had doing mathematical research, nothing beats working on something important.
