Compounding Success is a series on the plethora of careers in pharmacy. Dr. Venkatesh Satram ‘17 is a director of Global Project Management and Leadership at Daiichi Sankyo, a Japanese-based global pharmaceutical company. He talked about his position and how he found his way there through a post-graduate fellowship.
What does a director of global project management and leadership at a global pharmaceutical company do?
I'm a global project manager in charge of the drug development of two novel assets. I oversee and drive the development of each of these assets through the stages of the drug-development process.
Developing a drug takes a village. It takes people with different expertise, many of them who are pharmacists, many more of them who are chemists, doctors, engineers, marketers and non-STEM majors. They're all working together to drive the development of this drug.
You can consider these different functions as spokes on a wheel. My job is sitting at the center of that wheel. Without the proper communication and without someone herding the sheep, so to speak, they'll run off in different directions. We do it without really any reporting structure; I'm going to use the term “matrix team” – a team that's composed of people from all these different functional areas; none of them reports to each other. So my job is to make sure all the team members are communicating appropriately, that we're not acting in silos, and then ensuring that we are delivering to the company as well as to our shareholders.
People could come into your role from different routes. What does a pharmacist bring to it? What led you here?
I appreciated the deep scientific knowledge gained during my clinical years, training as a pharmacist. I appreciated some of the complexities specifically around things like drug metabolism. I did summer research with our pharmacokinetics professor at the ACPHS Vermont campus, Dr. Stefan Balaz, which gave me an appreciation for not only how drugs work, but for the complexities involved in having a drug actually hit its target in your body.
I really wanted to have kind of that broader impact. When you speak about some drugs that have come out in recent years – especially in cancer research – such as immuno-oncology therapies, I-O therapies as they're known, they've changed the face of treatment. People live years longer now, decades longer. To be part of literally changing the face of healthcare was attractive to me.
That was what drew me into the pharma world. Even now, the industry is learning. They have picked up in the last few years the value of pharmacists – that there is a lot of value in bringing in these highly educated, clinically oriented folks in a variety of fields.
I chose the project-management role specifically because it is a really central role; I get to see everything. I get to see everything from how we actually create the pill to the marketing material once we're going to get a drug approved.
How did you learn about this career path?
I had applied to about eight fellowships. I was at American Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists Midyear Clinical Meeting, and I had something like seven days of interviews nonstop. I really landed at my role having gone through the interviews. At the time, I had two medical affairs offers as well as a project management one. After talking to the team, I thought the company with the project management offer, which was Celgene, was the best fit.
So I did two years as a global project manager fresh out of school.
A lot of folks who graduate from pharmacy school have a pharmacist mentality, which is that you're the subject-matter expert, you should have the answer. But nobody taught me project management in school. That was part of the learning experience. I enjoyed that.
What makes this job the right fit for you?
My day is never the same. I don't punch in at 8 a.m. and punch out of 5 p.m., and there's always something new happening. It's very dynamic.
It's also very nebular, which I actually appreciate. It does take a certain type of individual to come into something a bit more gray, a bit less defined.
Being a PM is very based on the circumstance. You can't be the same PM with one team that perhaps takes direction really well, is very independent with very strong workers as you can be with another team, which perhaps is more junior and needs direction.
I also have the ability to structure not just my day, but my career path as well. A lot of people come into this PM role typically in drug development, so they can get that higher-level vision of how drug development works and say, “Okay, I've been a clinical scientist for 10 years. But I want to do something else.” So they work as a PM. For a few years they get to see the full process outside of their own job.
So this job is dynamic, it’s nebular, and it really just opens up a lot of possibilities.
What kind of student or young pharmacist would do well in this career? What would you advise them?
My preceptor gave me the best advice when I was looking at the fellowship: “I don't want you to focus on where you want to go next. I want you to focus on where you don't want to go next. You have so many options of what you can do, try to figure out if there is anything you don’t want to do.”
He was advising you to leave as many options as possible open.
Exactly, and that's really what it is: Don't feel like you're cutting off avenues, because there's so much for you to do.
To the other part of your question about what kind of a student would do well in this? It really does have to be a student who is comfortable with being uncomfortable. You have to be okay with not having an order or a prescription, or a step-by-step process in front of you. It has to be someone comfortable setting their own career. The person who is driven, who is willing to take risks. And lastly, you just have to have a passion for learning.
It's got to be someone who's not afraid of failure, which I think is a big pill to swallow, especially for pharmacy students. Because for pharmacists, we associate failure with patient complications.
But the truth is most people work their entire lives on products that never see the light of day. Because that's how drug development is; not every single drug is going to be a success. So you have to be willing to understand when something is a failure and not let that get you down individually.
One more question: What recommendations would you give a pharmacy student trying to figure out what path to follow?
Try as many things as you can. I would recommend people diversify their APPEs (advanced pharmacy practice experiences). Don't just pick APPEs for location.
Look at nuclear pharmacy, look at pharma, look at compounding. A big thing in Vermont is telehealth, right? There are tons of opportunities out there for pharmacists beyond traditional community and clinical pharmacies. And if you don't experience it, you won't know.
For folks who are interested in pharma, it has gotten competitive because more and more people are realizing the possibilities. So start early. Try to get an internship.
Try to understand who you are as an individual.