2.1 Pharmaceutical Industry

Clinical trials in human volunteers

Do you want to discover whether a potential new medicine developed in the laboratory has the potential to cure diseases in humans? The first studies in humans are carried out in healthy volunteers. You would design new tests that can be carried out safely in volunteers that would indicate that a new compound was both safe and effective. You would bring knowledge of diseases, an understanding of human biology, the technology of measuring systems and an understanding of statistics and the design of experiments. You would like working in teams with toxicologists, medical staff and technologists. Pharmacologists working in clinical trials produce papers, which are used to obtain approval of medicines by regulatory authorities as well as for scientific publication in journals like the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. You will attend scientific meetings round the world to present the results of your work.

You can enter such organisations with a first degree as a research assistant or having studied further to obtain an MSc or PhD.

For further details go to pharmaceutical company and biotechnology company web sites - Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry web site.

Piet van der Graaf

Piet van der Graaf (37) studied Pharmacy in The Netherlands and obtained a Ph.D. in Clinical Medicine at King’s College London under supervision of Sir James Black (Nobel Laureate Medicine 1988) for his work on quantitative pharmacological characterisation of α1-adrenoceptors. He subsequently worked as a Post-Doc at the Division of Pharmacology at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam with Professor Pramod Saxena and as Team Leader in the Urology Group of Synthelabo Recherche in Paris. After this, he moved back to The Netherlands and worked as a Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences at the Division of Pharmacology at the Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research with Professors Meindert Danhof and Douwe Breimer on the development of mechanism-based PK-PD models. Since 1999, he has been working at Pfizer Global Research & Development in Sandwich (UK), currently as Director of Discovery Biology and Head of Sexual Health.