What are the main career paths for doctors in pharmaceutical medicine?
The main career paths are in clinical research, medical affairs and drug safety and risk management. – Clinical research involves writing and developing clinical protocols to test medicines in patients, and running clinical trials. – Where you have developed a drug and you have a licence, you still have to look after it, and communicate its value as well as conduct further clinical trials – medical affairs leads the medical effort in making sure pharma companies do this in an ethical and compliant way. – Safety of medicines is our number one priority and physicians in that function collect and analyse safety reports on medicines in development, as well as on marketed medicines, and continually review the benefit-to-risk ratio. Away from medical functions in pharma companies, some doctors then go off into the business world. Other areas like public affairs, health policy, outcomes research (health economics) and regulatory affairs (dealing with regulatory agencies around the world) are
