As a fourth-year student in the Brown Medical School, Barrett Bready has his choice of more than 150 elective clerkships, such as pulmonary medicine, infectious diseases, even plastic surgery.
But the subject he wanted to learn about most, biotechnology, was not offered. So Bready, a 26-year-old East Greenwich native, pitched the idea to school administrators. It took.
Under a new biotechnology elective approved by the medical school in January, fourth-year medical students can earn credit by working with executive-level scientists and medical directors at one of four Boston-area biomedical companies, including Biogen Inc. and Boston Scientific Corp.
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It might be the first program in the country to offer a non-clinical rotation at private biotech firms, the medical school said.
“Biotechnology companies are becoming increasingly important in the translation of basic research into use in clinical practice,” said Dr. Donald J. Marsh, dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown Medical School. “I think it’s important for some students…to have the opportunity to decide whether or not they want to participate in biotechnology.”
That decision is a done deal for Bready. Like the rest of his 85-member class, he will tack an “M.D.” onto his name upon graduation in May – except he says you won’t find him in the clinic, but in a commercial lab or office in Boston.
“I think biotechnology is the future of medicine, and for a while now I’ve planned to go into biotech as my career,” Bready said.
The biomedical industry has become an increasingly intriguing career alternative for medical school graduates.
Instead of facing three years as an intern – working grueling hospital hours for a salary in the mid-$30,000 range – the biotech industry often offers a more-lucrative option, although salary data for entry-level biotech positions are scarce.
And thanks to the snowballing progress in biomedical research – much of it stemming from advances in genetics research – biotech jobs are proliferating.
The number of U.S. biotech jobs has grown more than 60 percent since 1996, according to the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), a trade group. In 2001 there were nearly 1,500 biotech companies in the country – including 230 firms in New England – employing 191,000 people nationally.
Bready, who is the son of Providence-based Nortek CEO Richard Bready, researched hundreds of biomedical companies for the clerkship within an 80-mile radius of Providence. He whittled the candidates down to four target companies: Biogen; medical-device maker Boston Scientific; CombinatoRx Inc., a biopharmaceutical firm; and An Vil Inc., a bioinformatics company.
A senior-level executive at each company has been granted an adjunct faculty appointment at Brown Medical School, and each executive will mentor one medical student.
Each program will offer a markedly different experience, depending on the company. For instance, Bready completed an eight-week “test run” of the new rotation last year, working at an R&D facility of Boston Scientific in Watertown, Mass., where he studied the prospect of using stem cell therapy to treat chronic heart failure.
Bready pored over reams of literature on the subject, trying to decide if the technology was a viable avenue to pursue for Boston Scientific, which is one of the largest medical-device companies in the world. His mentor was the guy who makes those very decisions for Boston Scientific: Chief Scientific Officer Art Rosenthal.
“The clerkship offers students a tutorial on how one thinks through the process of translating frontier technologies into clinical practice,” said Rosenthal, who met with Bready for two hours a week to discuss his research. “You’re looking at a technology and thinking about the science behind it and the problems with it and how it could be commercialized – these are real life questions.”
At Cambridge-based Biogen, Dr. Mariska Kooijmans-Coutinho, the firm’s director of clinical research, envisions taking Brown students through a whirlwind tour of the drug-development process, from discovery of a target molecule through preclinical testing, clinical trials, regulatory approval and, yes, even marketing. Each step of the way, students will work one-on-one with a different mentor at Biogen, she said.
Just as importantly, though, Kooijmans-Coutinho said students would learn the pragmatic realities of drug development, such as how to work within a budget and when to pull the plug on a drug candidate – a decision made often at any biotech firm. Take Biogen’s psoriasis drug, Amevive, which received regulatory approval last month. The time from molecule discovery to market approval: 15 years.
Kooijmans-Coutinho said medical students often have little exposure to opportunities in the private sector. During the 10 years she spent as an internist in the Netherlands before arriving at Biogen, the thought of a business career never crossed her mind.
“My only contact with industry was with (pharmaceutical) sales reps who I didn’t want to let into my office,” she said. But now Kooijmans-Coutinho is convinced that the most rewarding aspect of medicine for her is helping patients through new technologies.
Both Rosenthal and Kooijmans-Coutinho say they agreed to participate in the clerkship because they believe in the benefits of exposing medical students to career paths in the biomedical field. But they also concede that the program gives the companies the inside track in recruiting young talent.
“It’s a two-way street,” Kooijmans-Coutinho said. “We hope to get them enthusiastic about developing new drugs, and it gives us the opportunity to meet bright young minds at Brown.”
So does the clerkship mean that Brown’s brightest biotech prospects will beeline for Boston when they graduate, bypassing Rhode Island’s fledgling biotech sector?
Not necessarily, said Dr. Michael Lysaght, a professor in the Brown Medical School and director of the school’s Center for Biomedical Engineering.
Lysaght, who also co-founded CytoTherapeutics – Rhode Island’s first biotech company (which has since relocated to California) – said the point of the clerkship is to offer students who are interested in biotech some hands-on experience.
“To do this, you need a certain critical mass,” Lysaght said. “I think some biotech companies in Rhode Island eventually will have the size and resources to be able to participate in that program.”
He added that the biotech clerkship is simply one step in Brown’s concerted effort to ally itself more closely with the biotechnology field. For instance, the school has plans to build a $100 million life-sciences building on its campus. It started its Center for Biomedical Engineering two years ago, and last year began a graduate program in the field.
