Narrator - Dr. Abel  00:00
Welcome to HelixTalk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers, covering real life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics and drug therapy discussions.

Narrator - ?  00:11
This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosalind Franklin University, College of Pharmacy.

Narrator - Dr. Abel  00:17
This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not professional advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified health care provider.

Narrator - ?  00:27
And now on to the show.

Dr. Sean Kane  00:31
Welcome to HelixTalk episode 130 I'm your co host, Dr. Kane. I'm Dr. Patel. We actually have two exciting announcements before we start today's episode. So the first announcement is that we now have a mailing list. So if you go to HelixTalk.com and you click on the subscribe to our mailing list link on that homepage, whenever we come up with new episodes, you can get that episode emailed to you in your inbox. This is perfect for those that don't have podcast catchers on their phones and things like that, but want to be alerted whenever a new episode comes out. So if you'd like that, go to our website, helix, talk.com and go ahead and sign up.

Dr. Khyati Patel  01:06
Part of our second announcement, we want to bring in the audience on the behind the scene of what it takes to come up with an episode, and we want your participation. We are working on a potential covid 19 vaccine hesitancy episode, but we want to hear from you. So this is not a research survey, but we want to hear from you about things that you have heard from patients and family members and friends about just covid 19 vaccine and kind of concerns or issues or hesitancies that they're having. It's a short nine question survey. It will take you no more than two minutes to complete. The link will be available on the HelixTalk, and the survey will be live. So if you can please take that couple minutes of your time to complete the survey, it would make our episode content that much more strong. So thank you for doing that already.

Dr. Sean Kane  02:01
All right now, without further ado, I am so excited about today's episode again, Episode 130 the title of today's episode is from pharmacy student to clinical scientist in pharma, an interview with Dr. Anastasia koshkina. So Anastasia or Dr. koshkina, welcome to the episode today.

Speaker 1  02:21
Thank you so happy to be here, and it's definitely an honor to come back to the RSU community and broader Thank you for having me perfect.

Dr. Sean Kane  02:30
You know, I think it would be reasonable, Dr. koshkina to kind of just orient the audience of who you are and why you're here, so maybe you could just tell us a little bit about your current position and, very briefly, your career path that we'll we'll talk more about, but what was your career path and getting to where you are today?

Speaker 1  02:46
Yeah, thank you. Absolutely. Happy to begin. So I graduated in 2018 from the College of Pharmacy at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. I then pursued a two year fellowship with Rutgers University in collaboration with Johnson and Johnson in late stage clinical development. I graduated from the Rutgers program last spring, actually, about a year, and I joined, was able to stay on with Johnson and Johnson and or Janssen Johnson. Janssen will will talk about a little bit. I'll mention, how does the two names coincide? But I am currently a clinical trial scientist in translational and experimental medicine, and so what does that mean? It means that I design, carry out, monitor, close off, and report on early development clinical trials. So trials, starting from the first in human trial when we're dosing patients for the first time with a new medication, and up until the point where we pass on the medication to late development for further larger phase 2b and phase three trial.

Dr. Khyati Patel  03:57
Well, this all sounds really exciting, and we want to know everything about that, but we want to kind of go back in time and tell our audience, like, what set you up for success. So tell us a little bit about where you were in pharmacy school in terms of your career development, and what kind of activities and things that you partake in that gave you the opportunity to do this fellowship.

Speaker 1  04:24
So my interest in research actually stemmed even before pharmacy school. And I came to pharmacy school with the thought that I do want to do research and I want to study drugs. At that point, I didn't really know, and I didn't have a picture in my mind of how that would happen, what is the best way to accomplish that, but I knew that I do want to go down the research route, and not so much down the traditional pharmacist path route, although throughout pharmacy school I definitely enjoyed all the clinical knowledge. We got, and certainly the patient interactions that we were exposed to and taught. So that definitely is still with me, even though I don't necessarily use it from day to day. And so the realization that I want to come to industry really came from that question, okay, I want to study drugs. I how do I get it? How? What is that pathway that would get me to do research, and what should that research look like? And throughout pharmacy school, what most intrigued me is the behind the scenes, behind papers, behind literature, behind trials. I was always curious how it happened that this paper was published. What kind of trial had to happen? What are all those steps? What does it take to set up a clinical trial in order to result in this publication and then, ultimately, hopefully, an improvement in in treatment, right? And then it made the evidence make it into the guidelines and and how does that process actually happen? So then early on, during my p1 and p2 year, I was able to attend some of the fellowship information sessions, which are hosted by usually some of the largest programs in the country that we have fellowship programs in the country, and they're usually virtual. They're open to everyone. And it was that window to me once I was able to listen to a few of those presentations to understand that this is the path, this is the way, this is the opportunity to actually step into industry, and this is where all those trials happen. This is the people that do that behind the scenes work on a lot of cases to actually push drugs forward, to study them. And so ever since that early on in pharmacy school, I did have my mind set on going down the fellowship route.

Dr. Sean Kane  06:59
First of all, I think that story is amazing, because I think a lot of pharmacy students, or students in general, may have some idea of what they want to do when they graduate, but I think that you were fairly unique in having a very clear sense of what you wanted to do pretty early on. It sounds like those fellowship sessions were pretty helpful. When? When did you attend those? What? What point in your academic career were you involved in that?

Speaker 1  07:25
Yeah, thank you. That's a great question, and I think very important to understand for students that these fellowship sometimes they call them fellowship networking sessions, fellowship information sessions. It depends on the program, but to my knowledge, most large programs do host them, and that's their opportunity to recruit students. That's their opportunity to say what the program is about, what did the current fellows do, how they got there, and what is their potential for after the fellowship. In order to build that network, reach out to those fellows. They always give in those type of sessions. They always give their contact info, and they're actually soliciting, and they're looking for students to reach out to them. This is an absolutely great opportunity, because current fellows, there's no one better than the current fellows to tell you how they're doing, what the program is about, are they getting what they need out of it? And any best advice that they can give you for the actual process to go through the interviews, is the fellows, because they've just been through it,

Dr. Khyati Patel  08:34
I think based on what you said, Dr. koshkina, you know this, this field is very saturated. It's competitive, and in order to have successful career in pharma, you need to start early. And I think your example shows that how you started early and how you saw mere assignments in classroom just beyond what you were asked to do as a student, you saw passion in there, and you, you kind of, you know, pursued your own path that's awesome. In addition to fellowship, what other things students can do while they're in pharmacy school in order to kind of get oriented to how industry works? Did you have any like, APPE experiences that kind of gave you a picture of what this path may look like.

Speaker 1  09:21
I did have an app you rotation in horizon therapeutics. So it's a smaller pharma company located in the Chicago land area, and it I, my rotation was in medical information. And it certainly I, at that point, I already knew I wanted to go to research and development, because my app you was a it was an appy. So I was a p4 so at that point, I already had an idea of what type of sectors of pharma I would like to go into, again, following that passion of research and really getting down to the nitty gritty research. So. Then rotation, however, wasn't medical information to me. It was very helpful, and it did give me a lot, especially in preparation for the interviews during mid year. First of all, it gave me the feel for industry. It gave me that last reality check, if you will, that am I capable of doing this? Is this how I want my day to day job basically, to look like? Because although the tasks are obviously very different in medical information versus clinical development, but the settings and pharma in general are the same. So am I okay to coming into an office every day? Am I okay to spend most of the day in meetings? Am I okay to basically look at my laptop and the screen for for most of my day and accomplish my work that way? So in that sense, to me personally, that was, again, a check of this is how I want this to be. This is this. I can do this, and this is something that I'm okay with. Second of all, it really allowed me to get an understanding for how Pharma is structured on the high level. So high level picture of these are the typical sectors. These. This is what each sector does. These are the type of objectives and tasks that are faced before the professionals within those sectors. So I gained feel for pharma in general, of how it's structured. I gained also that jargon, because you do need to speak a little bit of the pharma terms, if you will, and during interviews, that actually does stand out, because they do pick up very well that again, you know what you're talking about, and it's super important when you arrive to those interviews, to really know why you're there, why you want this particular position, and why you want industry in general, versus anything else that is available, any other path that you could be pursuing as a pharmacist.

Dr. Sean Kane  12:03
So Dr. Koshkina, I want to kind of clarify one thing that maybe is not as obvious to the listeners. So as you mentioned, there's different sectors to these pharma companies, and your current sector is more involving being a clinical scientist, where you're designing and running clinical trials, and when you were at Horizon, you said that you were in the kind of medical information sector of the company. I think it's important to kind of emphasize, and maybe you can just expand on it a little bit, that these sectors are pretty unique. You know, it's not like you work at a pharmaceutical company and you work in all of these different areas. You know, you do kind of specialize in this we'll talk about in a second. You did specialize as part of your fellowship, could you just kind of expand on that, that there are these different sectors that pharmacists can play a role in, and oftentimes you kind of pick the sector and kind of go in that one sector, as opposed to dancing around the company in a variety of different areas.

Speaker 1  12:57
Yeah, very important point that, again, for especially students that are thinking to apply, you do need to narrow down your options. So Pharma is huge, and there's a lot that you can do. There are very many factors, actually, if you look at it. But typically, when we think of and for the ease of explaining here, typically we think of the research and development sector. I refer to it a lot as R and D, in short, and within research and development, this is where I sit. This is clinical development. This is basically people that do run clinical trials in patients. These are also people that do the discovery. So actually, the scientists that work at the bench that actually synthesize, if you will, right, come up with the chemical with the compound itself. It also oftentimes includes the sector of animal studies and animal toxicology. So these are the studies that are done. Before we're able to dose anything in any human we need to make sure that we run our toxicity studies in animals and they're fairly clean. And then, usually within research and development, you also have the Clinical Pharmacology colleagues, which we are all aware of, the topic and concepts of clinical pharmacology. And when you hear in school, in some of your basic pkpd classes, that there's something called pkpd modeling. So those are the clinical pharmacologists within pharmaceutical companies. Usually, those are the professionals that we refer to when we say clinical pharmacologist. It's usually people who conduct PK PD modeling and people who conduct clinical pharmacology studies, than later on in patients. So then, usually alongside R and G, there's also usually sectors that are commercially oriented, that are regulatory oriented, that are operationally oriented. Operations would be our colleagues that, for example, help us conduct. Clinical trials. So they actually do kind of all the, just like it sounds, all the logistical work, if you will, our commercial colleagues would go out and research the market for us. And this is they're involved actually throughout the development of the compound, and of course, after it launches and is actually available on market as well. They start early on, when we just have an idea, trying to say, basically, answer the question, is this idea feasible, right? So, is there a need in the market? Is are there patients that we're going to be able to treat this? Are we going to reach the right populations, so kind of the competitive and therapeutic landscape for for a particular, let's say, disease area. And then, as we carry out clinical trials, we also sometimes tap into their resources to see what the competitors, again, are doing, but now not on the high level of just the disease state, let's say, but in particular, if we have direct competition with a particular type of molecule, particular drug class, particular disease state, and we actually ask them, Can you give us an overview of what other trials are ongoing? Where are they in terms of their development? And then, of course, the commercial colleagues are also involved to prepare that product. Lange, once we've conducted all the clinical trials, the drug would move into medical affairs. So Medical Affairs would be also medical professionals that don't carry out the trials anymore. The trials are done. They're the ones that actually prepare again, in concert with the commercial colleagues. They prepare the actual launch. They prepare all the all the information, the medical information that will come out along with the drug hitting the market. So they prepare the landscape of KOLs, the landscape of payers and users that will actually be sort of the first one to write to actually get the drug. And actually, there will be the most knowledgeable. They'll have the right medical information that we have put out to accompany the drug launch regulatory affairs. They basically are involved on, usually on the R and D side, because, of course, they support things like the investigational new drug, new drug application, any interactions with any health authorities worldwide, for the US, it would be FDA, it would be EMA in Europe, so on and so forth. And then, of course, they would support also Lange. And of course, the final interaction, any meetings we have with the FDA, and the actual approval. So just within that there is so much, these are high bucket areas, but there's so much that you can dive in and do within each of those sectors. And so when you're applying for fellowships, for example, you do need to narrow down some of your choices, because if you are going for everything that's out there without really having a solid answer again, for why you want one or two areas that are maybe related to each other, let's say my sector, clinical development and medical affairs are very similar, because there's medical professionals who both deal with medical information. Yes, one carries out the trials, one kind of supports the drugs and their medical context moving forward and out of the clinical trials. But you can, you can tie the two together, because, again, you need a lot of medical knowledge, clinical knowledge to do both jobs. But if you go for anything between medical information all the way to R and D, and everything in between, and regulatory and commercial, it starts to be very hard to defend yourself of why, why you're so spread then. So the general rule of thumb is to narrow it down to a few areas that you can well explain why you can be good in either of those, and why you would want either of those, and how the skills kind of that you have applied to either or so.

Dr. Khyati Patel  19:07
Dr. goshkina, thank you for that overview. It seems like their opportunities are just endless when, when thinking of their career, and they just need to kind of find the affinity and the interest and the passion like you did going back to the drawing board a little bit when you were growing up for your fellowship applications, kind of thinking of those times, you know, What's the process like, if you can describe it briefly, and you know, what are the kind of qualities that The companies are looking for in the fellows.

Speaker 1  19:42
So thinking back to the application process. So let's, let's start with that and give a little bit of an overview of what that entails. And so the application process, most pharmaceutical industry positions do interview at mid year. So if you want to bring. To industry, you have to go to mid year, of course. Now it's a it's a different definition, because a lot of the inter Most interviews are, of course, virtual, and that makes it easier. But in pre covid times, you would have needed to travel to mid year for sure. So the process is actually very short lived when I think back about it, but really, there's a lot involved. So usually pharmaceutical industry fellowships start to interview, for example, on Saturday at mid year. So they start earlier, because the majority of rounds of interviews happen during mid year, and there are multiple rounds of interviews, so you're at least going to have two interviews, if not three, three rounds, and they happen between that Saturday afternoon and basically early afternoon on Monday. The other important aspect of interviewing for pharmaceutical industry fellowships is beyond besides the interviews some companies also tried to host either receptions or brunches. And this is an informal interview, but it is an interview and it's a by invitation event. If you do get invited, it's a good sign. It means they like you, and you are progressing through their list of candidates. You are, let's say on the top half of that list also fellowship interviews. If you've gone through all the rounds at mid year, let's say you've gone to a reception then after mid year, shortly after, they send out invitations for on site interviews. It's not a set in stone rule. Some programs do have on site interviews. Some don't. In fact, some do offer right at mid year. So you might have three rounds, have a reception, and by the time you leave mid year, you might have an offer in hand. And other programs are very particular about having to invite the candidate to the office, because they don't feel it's appropriate to to hire without showing you where you would be for the next two years and and how, how is the environment in that office, and also give you an opportunity to meet the broader team, besides maybe the limited team that you got to Meet at mid year.

Dr. Khyati Patel  22:20
Yeah, this overview is fantastic. And you know, it sounds like students need to go in with that mindset to the mid year, that this might be it, that they may get selection, or there might be some on site interviews, so like the phase two kind of process start. And I just wanted to clarify for the audience that when you mentioned interviews at ASHP mid year, they do have to register into that personal placement services, so there is an additional registration required. That's where most of the industry interviews occur.

Speaker 1  22:53
Yes, that is correct. Thank you for pointing that out. Yes, most fellowships do advertise so to speak on PPS, the personal placement service. So yes, when you do register for mid year, you will need to register for PPS in order to be able to go through those interviews.

Dr. Sean Kane  23:12
Dr. Koshkina, I think that's super important, and I feel like we've done a really good job highlighting the competitiveness of the fellowship process and the interview process kind of sounds like it could be pretty stressful. You and I spoke previously about kind of what the programs are looking for with these candidates. So, you know, we had mentioned commonly, you're going to get a lot of situational based questions. Of, tell me about a time when then you better have a good answer for those things. Ideally, we're looking at leadership qualities, where you can demonstrate that you can work in a team, that you can lead a team, and things like that. One thing that we didn't talk about, that I was curious about, is something as simple as academics with GPA. Is there kind of a rule of thumb or a general threshold of if someone is serious about pursuing a fellowship program? Is there kind of a GPA minimum, if you will, that really, it has to be above blank, or even, ideally, above some other number to even kind of get into the process in the first place?

Speaker 1  24:13
Yeah, thank you for that question. And it's, it's a little bit complex in terms of kind of a set cut off point, and I will, I will not say anything, because there doesn't one doesn't exist simply, but that doesn't mean that that is not looked at. So what, what we look at when we hire candidates, and what companies look at is they look at potential. That's the biggest thing that they're assessing on an interview, and they're assessing your potential to succeed in the fellowship, but more so to succeed as an industry professional. And there is a particular set of qualities right, instead of in a particular type of standard right, that they look in and candidates and make sure that that candidate. It either already has it, but has really a good potential to develop in the next two years. And so it goes without saying that they, of course, will look at at your accomplishments and at your Dr. Kane, like you mentioned, your leadership skills. What kind of roles you hosted? Where did you think outside the box, right? And how do you do that? How do you think on your feet? That comes with the situational interviewing, and it comes very obvious that students who, let's say, aren't very collected, aren't very determined, or haven't been through pharmacy school. They haven't, they didn't build that passion. Let's say for for the profession doesn't have to be industry, just needs to be the profession, for what they're doing, for why they're doing it. It comes out very fast that also potentially, academically, there were lags and so again, there's no cut off and threshold, but I guarantee you that that is looked at and students who shows strong academic record, they ultimately, a lot of the times, are also the ones that have those other qualities that fall under the umbrella, again, that Leadership, that determination, that potential. So again, there's no cut off for GPA, but it does come out, and we do do look at that.

Dr. Khyati Patel  26:29
Additionally, it seems that you know some kind of distinguishing experiences, like research while in pharmacy school are kind of showing that you've gone above and beyond in terms of like, showing your communication skills and stuff would come in handy too. But kind of fast forward to your fellowship year. We want to kind of give audience an idea. What does the fellowship entail? What's the typical structure? Number of rotation, how long they are, what does it look like if somebody is going into fellowship.

Speaker 1  27:02
So fellowships structure is actually varied, but overall, most Fellowships are two years, and you usually do not have rotations in in fellowships. It depends on the again, those sectors that we talk about, and really what makes sense to expose the fellow to in the two years, and for most sectors, for most positions, it does take the two years to really learn what you're doing, especially when you enter companies. It's not something that as students, we are really exposed to, even if you had several rotations, let's say you're having such a short snapshot in time and in activities that you can do in six or eight weeks, again, depending on the sector, but a lot of the times, for most sectors, it's just you might be working on a portion of a large project, and You might just understand maybe that one portion, just have that exposure more even so then the development of the skill set. And so then when you arrive to a fellowship, the idea is, again, to give not exposure, but to give hands on training. Because the expectation is that when you step out of the fellowship and you're hired into a comparable job of where it is that you were trained and for the role that you were trained for, you basically step in and you do your job. There's, there's no more. This is, this is, we're going to take some time to educate you. And so these two years are structured in that way that you first, you not only learn the hands on job, you also have the understanding and build that on the bigger understanding of the bigger picture of where you are. Where is your particular team. How does that team fit into your sector? How does that sector fit into the bigger picture of the company.

Dr. Sean Kane  29:01
So Dr. Koshkin, it sounds like you've had a very exciting career path already in terms of pharmacy school fellowship for two years now, clinical scientist position where you're doing kind of early clinical development, looking back on your experience so far, what do you think listeners, especially the p3 or p4 pharmacy student who's interested in industry. What kind of advice would you like to provide them as we kind of wrap up today's episode, so that they can get a leg up on the whole process and have a better sense of their pathway moving forward?

Speaker 1  29:35
Yeah, thank you for that question. And I do have two main things that I really want to convey. And looking back at my experience, I think those two are really the key. The first is, when you're trying to get into a fellowship, I think the critical things is to really know, do your homework and really know why you're there, why you. Want this fellowship, and why do you think you fit well into the tasks that this type of a position might carry out? And I can't stress enough that you will be asked this question on every single interview, and you don't have you do not have time and mid year to think about it right then and there. You have to have the story down and laid out before you come. You need to respond without thinking when that comes. And that has to be a cohesive, logical story that grabs the interviewer, grabs the interviewer, grabs their attention and makes them interested in you from the get go. That's that first impression, if you will, when you sit down for that interview. That's absolutely critical. The second thing is to do not discount the actual team and the people that you meet. People are everything. And this goes for fellowships. This goes for jobs. You much rather work with an awesome team that is invested in you, invested in you as a professional, in your professional development moving forward. They see the potential in you, and they have the willingness to develop you. You'd much rather work with those people and have the perfect job description or the perfect fellowship description that you might not even know exactly what it entails, and so you actually get in there and do it. But it might sound like this is your dream job, but the people that you meet at that interview, for lack of a better word, you don't click with or you don't feel that they're invested in you as again, as a professional as a fellow, that they want to develop and they want to move forward. And so when that disconnect happens and you get that position, you're kind of stuck a little bit because the people again is everything. It's the people that will get you that perfect job description when you move on, and they'll get you whatever you want to do if they believe in you and they see that potential in you. So make sure that, again, they're picking you, but you're picking them.

Dr. Khyati Patel  32:10
Dr. koshkina, I think that point you mentioned about you want to work with people who can elevate you and your career. That's really important, you know. And as we talked about how competitive this is, and now we are here talking about, want to be working for a common good as a team, I think those two concepts might be polar opposite, but equally important. So thank you for bringing that up, and thank you so much for taking the time to share your career path and how you got to your wonderful pharma position that you're in, because not very many students go into it, and it's very unique. And so we appreciate your time for sharing that and sharing the very useful and helpful tips for our student listeners. So thank you for being here today to our listeners. We would like to mention one more time that we have a vaccine hesitancy survey out there for your contribution, we would really appreciate if you can take couple minutes of your time to answer this line question survey that's going to make our future vaccine hesitancy episode that much more meaningful, and you will be indirectly contributing. So thank you in advance for doing that.

Dr. Sean Kane  33:19
And you know, for that survey, it's available at our website, HelixTalk.com also all of the show notes for today's episode with Dr. koshkina, again, this is episode 130 are also available at our website. HelixTalk.com we love the five star reviews in iTunes, so keep those coming. And we're also on Twitter at HelixTalk if you want to see pearls from previous episodes or even today's episode that will show up in that Twitter feed as well. So also, I'd like to echo what Dr. Patel said. Dr. koshkina, thank you so much for your time. We really do appreciate it. And with that, I'm Dr. Kane.

Dr. Khyati Patel  33:50
I'm Dr. Patel, and thank you again. Dr. koshkina, it was wonderful having you.

Speaker 1  33:55
Thank you everyone. Thank you for having me. It was great.

Narrator - Dr. Abel  33:58
If you enjoyed the show, please help us climb the iTunes rankings for medical podcasts by giving us a five star review in the iTunes Store. Search for HelixTalk and place your review there

Narrator - ?  34:09
to suggest an episode or contact us. We're online at HelixTalk.com thank you for listening to this episode of HelixTalk. This is an educational production copyright Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.