Hello Per Arvidsson, Platform Director at the Drug Discovery and Development (DDD) platform at SciLifeLab which will play an important role in the upcoming Vinnova sponsored research school in Drug discovery and development:
What will the students do in your lab?
“Personnel from the DDD platform will contribute with expertise in the theoretical parts of the program, but we also open our labs for those students who wish to do their practical placement at SciLifeLab DDD. We have industry standard laboratories, the greatest team of coworkers, and work with exciting projects from the best academics in Sweden, so if I were a student on the course myself I know where I would go for placement”.
What will they learn?
“A research school of any length will never be able to replace multiple years of on-the-job training. However, given the new landscape for early drug discovery activities, there are also new and complementary skills needed. Therefore, in addition to the basics of drug discovery & development taught at many dedicated courses, we will include a large fraction of entrepreneurial and case-based training. We hope to be able to select students and postdocs who have a passion for transforming research into viable life-science projects, and give them the skills and network needed to operate in on the life science 2.0 arena”.
Why is DDD part of this research school?
“Vinnova has identified that Drug discovery and development is a topic learned “on-the-job” in industry. Trained individuals who leaves large companies and joins small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have been an essential part of the Swedish life science industry. Now, with the ongoing transformation of the life science industry, this essential knowledge transfer is at risk. At the same time, the “new pharma operating model” is based on a much closer interaction with external parties like SMEs and universities and that model will demand other sets of skills as well. The government created the DDD platform to prepare Swedish academia for this transformation and related opportunities. The research school is therefore perfectly aligned with our goals and will represent the lion part of the platform´s educational role during 2014-15”.
Per Arvidsson
About the research school
The Vinnova-funded research school in Drug Discovery and Development will open in January 2015. The school is open for PhD-students and postdocs in areas relevant to the subject from all Swedish universities aiming at a career in, or in collaboration with, pharmaceutical industry.
The school is part of a larger project aiming at improving the knowledge about Drug Discovery and Development within academia, as well as finding new platforms for collaboration between the two. The school is a 10-week course plus an optional 2-month internship period at a relevant company or organization. It will be based at Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University, performed in collaboration with a number of other universities, companies and institutions. It will have a focus on entrepreneurship and innovation, in parallel with providing knowledge of modern industry ways of working with drug discovery and development.