- Email: [email protected]
The researcher of the future…takes advantage of international opportunities
Comment
the industrial partners’ contribution to the project, and the HoT form asks applicants to outline arrangements around intellectual property and project management. Negotiations were protracted and difficult and ultimately the project was cut without warning and the industry partners withdrew. Several years of trust and effective collaboration were blown away. I also have experience of consultancy projects, which are usually commissioned directly by the industry partner; payments are either received by individuals or channelled back through university accounts to support research. Perhaps naively, I have undertaken this work primarily as a loss-leader to build personal relationships with industry contacts and to learn about industry problems and applications. Time will tell how useful this has been. Academic-industrial partnership now lies at the heart of the strategic plans of both the MRC and Wellcome Trust, with numerous initiatives to support collaborative research and training and career development opportunities— for example, the MRC industrial CASE scheme for PhD students and the Wellcome Trust Interdisciplinary Training Programmes for Clinicians in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics (I currently supervise a PhD student under the Scottish wing of the Wellcome scheme). There is also increasing evidence of industry actively reaching out to academia (eg, GlaxoSmithKline’s R&D Esprit programme and Discovery Partnerships with Academia). Perhaps the exemplar model for how academia and industry can
interact productively and sustain a durable partnership is the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy (DSTT)—a collaboration between the University of Dundee, MRC, and six of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the development of improved drugs to treat global diseases such as cancer. Founded in 1998 and awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in 2006, DSTT has just secured renewed funding until 2016. Engaging with industry opens up avenues for research that would not otherwise be possible, and although there are potential pitfalls, if we are serious about translational research, we cannot ignore the opportunities. Jonathan Fallowfield Queen’s Medical Research Institute, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK jfallowf@staffmail.ed.ac.uk Dr Jonathan Fallowfield is a Clinician Scientist Fellow supported by The Health Foundation and the Academy of Medical Sciences, and an honorary consultant hepatologist at the MRC Centre for Inflammation Research, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 1 2
3
4
Tralau-Stewart C, Wyatt C, Kleyn D, Ayad A. Drug discovery: new models for industry-academic partnerships. Drug Discov Today 2009; 14: 95–101. D’Este P, Perkmann M. Why do academics engage with industry? The entrepreneurial university and individual motivations. J Technol Transf 2011; 36: 316–39. Lambert review of business-university collaboration. London: Stationery Office, 2003. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/lambert_review_final_450. pdf (accessed Nov 27, 2012). Wellcome Trust response to the Lambert review, April 2003. http://www. wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/ documents/web_document/wtd002775.pdf (accessed Nov 27, 2012).
The researcher of the future…takes advantage of international opportunities Published Online February 27, 2013
8
For today’s clinician an international perspective on health has never been more important. An understanding of the global epidemiology and burden of disease is essential in a world where both international travel and migration are commonplace, and infectious diseases in particular are no longer neatly geographically constrained. And for today’s aspiring academic clinician the research landscape has never been more globalised. The internet, the proliferation of international conferences, and easy access to journals from around the world has meant that in all fields international collaborations are easy to pursue as well as essential to staying at the forefront of your chosen research area.
The past quarter of a century has seen a dramatic change in the way in which clinicians are trained in the UK. When I began my postgraduate career there was little concept of organised training for doctors once they passed their finals. For physicians there was the considerable hurdle of the MRCP(UK) Diploma, but other than that you just toiled through a series of career grades until you reached a point where an appointments committee would employ you as a consultant. If you aspired to an academic career, or just wanted to improve your chances against the competition, you would take several years out to pursue a PhD or MD, and that was about it. This system provided a great deal of freedom, and it was very much up to you www.thelancet.com
to make your own mix and match career. For aspiring academics working overseas meant obtaining your BTA (Been To America), attached to one of the excellent research labs in North American universities. Having had a peripatetic childhood, I was determined to work in the tropics on tropical diseases. There was no training programme or defined career path in tropical medicine, but I was lucky enough to get a job in one of the Wellcome Trust funded tropical units, one of the few places at the time where it was possible to work as a clinical academic in the tropics and still remain vaguely within the British medical system. I had done 5 years of very general medical training, had not settled on a specialty, and had no idea that I would complete my training and become a consultant once I returned to the UK. This wasn’t a particular disadvantage, since there was no highly regulated training pathway to fall off. This is no longer the case, with clinical training now prescribed in detail by the Modernising Medical Careers programme and meticulously orchestrated by the deaneries and Royal Colleges. This evolution in clinician training has led to trainees deciding on their chosen specialty much earlier in their careers, and once differentiated and on the training conveyer belt there may appear to be major disincentives to entertaining any deviation from the prescribed training path. Many of us in global health research feared that this would lead to a fall in the number of young physicians willing to spend several years obtaining what we considered valuable and meaningful research experience in the developing world, but thankfully for a number of reasons this depressing prediction has proven to be way off the mark. Many deaneries have been more flexible than expected about out of programme placements, and the Academic Clinical Fellowship scheme in particular has enabled many clinician scientists in training to spend research time in labs and clinical research units overseas, especially when deaneries have allowed research time to be concatenated into a longer, more productive attachment. A much greater recognition of the value of global health experience, combined with the dramatic increase in funding for global health research over the past decade, has led to the availability of more opportunities than ever to spend time fruitfully overseas. This change in attitude is not limited to the UK; North American residency rotations now often contain international training components (a trend the UK could learn from), www.thelancet.com
Corbis
Comment
and South-South clinical research collaborations between institutions in developing countries are increasingly common. International research collaborations are now more common than ever, supported by internationally minded funding bodies such as the Wellcome Trust, the UK Medical Research Council, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the US National Institutes of Health, and even the European Union, and fostered by improving transport links and the use of the internet. When recommending referees for papers and external PhD examiners it is not uncommon to have difficulty finding researchers in a specialty who are not collaborators. For clinician scientists in training, the pursuit of a carefully chosen international opportunity is likely to be both a career and life enhancing experience, whether for 3 months, 3 years, or longer, and whether in the developing world or a laboratory in North America, Australasia, or Europe. International links and a global perspective are increasingly indispensible adjuncts to a successful career. Nicholas Day Centre for Tropical Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; and Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Thailand [email protected] Prof Nicholas Day is Professor of Tropical Medicine at the Centre for Tropical Medicine, University of Oxford, and Director of the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, at the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University.
9
the industrial partners’ contribution to the project, and the HoT form asks applicants to outline arrangements around intellectual property and project management. Negotiations were protracted and difficult and ultimately the project was cut without warning and the industry partners withdrew. Several years of trust and effective collaboration were blown away. I also have experience of consultancy projects, which are usually commissioned directly by the industry partner; payments are either received by individuals or channelled back through university accounts to support research. Perhaps naively, I have undertaken this work primarily as a loss-leader to build personal relationships with industry contacts and to learn about industry problems and applications. Time will tell how useful this has been. Academic-industrial partnership now lies at the heart of the strategic plans of both the MRC and Wellcome Trust, with numerous initiatives to support collaborative research and training and career development opportunities— for example, the MRC industrial CASE scheme for PhD students and the Wellcome Trust Interdisciplinary Training Programmes for Clinicians in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics (I currently supervise a PhD student under the Scottish wing of the Wellcome scheme). There is also increasing evidence of industry actively reaching out to academia (eg, GlaxoSmithKline’s R&D Esprit programme and Discovery Partnerships with Academia). Perhaps the exemplar model for how academia and industry can
interact productively and sustain a durable partnership is the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy (DSTT)—a collaboration between the University of Dundee, MRC, and six of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the development of improved drugs to treat global diseases such as cancer. Founded in 1998 and awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in 2006, DSTT has just secured renewed funding until 2016. Engaging with industry opens up avenues for research that would not otherwise be possible, and although there are potential pitfalls, if we are serious about translational research, we cannot ignore the opportunities. Jonathan Fallowfield Queen’s Medical Research Institute, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK jfallowf@staffmail.ed.ac.uk Dr Jonathan Fallowfield is a Clinician Scientist Fellow supported by The Health Foundation and the Academy of Medical Sciences, and an honorary consultant hepatologist at the MRC Centre for Inflammation Research, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 1 2
3
4
Tralau-Stewart C, Wyatt C, Kleyn D, Ayad A. Drug discovery: new models for industry-academic partnerships. Drug Discov Today 2009; 14: 95–101. D’Este P, Perkmann M. Why do academics engage with industry? The entrepreneurial university and individual motivations. J Technol Transf 2011; 36: 316–39. Lambert review of business-university collaboration. London: Stationery Office, 2003. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/lambert_review_final_450. pdf (accessed Nov 27, 2012). Wellcome Trust response to the Lambert review, April 2003. http://www. wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/ documents/web_document/wtd002775.pdf (accessed Nov 27, 2012).
The researcher of the future…takes advantage of international opportunities Published Online February 27, 2013
8
For today’s clinician an international perspective on health has never been more important. An understanding of the global epidemiology and burden of disease is essential in a world where both international travel and migration are commonplace, and infectious diseases in particular are no longer neatly geographically constrained. And for today’s aspiring academic clinician the research landscape has never been more globalised. The internet, the proliferation of international conferences, and easy access to journals from around the world has meant that in all fields international collaborations are easy to pursue as well as essential to staying at the forefront of your chosen research area.
The past quarter of a century has seen a dramatic change in the way in which clinicians are trained in the UK. When I began my postgraduate career there was little concept of organised training for doctors once they passed their finals. For physicians there was the considerable hurdle of the MRCP(UK) Diploma, but other than that you just toiled through a series of career grades until you reached a point where an appointments committee would employ you as a consultant. If you aspired to an academic career, or just wanted to improve your chances against the competition, you would take several years out to pursue a PhD or MD, and that was about it. This system provided a great deal of freedom, and it was very much up to you www.thelancet.com
to make your own mix and match career. For aspiring academics working overseas meant obtaining your BTA (Been To America), attached to one of the excellent research labs in North American universities. Having had a peripatetic childhood, I was determined to work in the tropics on tropical diseases. There was no training programme or defined career path in tropical medicine, but I was lucky enough to get a job in one of the Wellcome Trust funded tropical units, one of the few places at the time where it was possible to work as a clinical academic in the tropics and still remain vaguely within the British medical system. I had done 5 years of very general medical training, had not settled on a specialty, and had no idea that I would complete my training and become a consultant once I returned to the UK. This wasn’t a particular disadvantage, since there was no highly regulated training pathway to fall off. This is no longer the case, with clinical training now prescribed in detail by the Modernising Medical Careers programme and meticulously orchestrated by the deaneries and Royal Colleges. This evolution in clinician training has led to trainees deciding on their chosen specialty much earlier in their careers, and once differentiated and on the training conveyer belt there may appear to be major disincentives to entertaining any deviation from the prescribed training path. Many of us in global health research feared that this would lead to a fall in the number of young physicians willing to spend several years obtaining what we considered valuable and meaningful research experience in the developing world, but thankfully for a number of reasons this depressing prediction has proven to be way off the mark. Many deaneries have been more flexible than expected about out of programme placements, and the Academic Clinical Fellowship scheme in particular has enabled many clinician scientists in training to spend research time in labs and clinical research units overseas, especially when deaneries have allowed research time to be concatenated into a longer, more productive attachment. A much greater recognition of the value of global health experience, combined with the dramatic increase in funding for global health research over the past decade, has led to the availability of more opportunities than ever to spend time fruitfully overseas. This change in attitude is not limited to the UK; North American residency rotations now often contain international training components (a trend the UK could learn from), www.thelancet.com
Corbis
Comment
and South-South clinical research collaborations between institutions in developing countries are increasingly common. International research collaborations are now more common than ever, supported by internationally minded funding bodies such as the Wellcome Trust, the UK Medical Research Council, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the US National Institutes of Health, and even the European Union, and fostered by improving transport links and the use of the internet. When recommending referees for papers and external PhD examiners it is not uncommon to have difficulty finding researchers in a specialty who are not collaborators. For clinician scientists in training, the pursuit of a carefully chosen international opportunity is likely to be both a career and life enhancing experience, whether for 3 months, 3 years, or longer, and whether in the developing world or a laboratory in North America, Australasia, or Europe. International links and a global perspective are increasingly indispensible adjuncts to a successful career. Nicholas Day Centre for Tropical Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; and Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University, Thailand [email protected] Prof Nicholas Day is Professor of Tropical Medicine at the Centre for Tropical Medicine, University of Oxford, and Director of the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, at the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University.
9