In college, I fell in love with the notion of correcting a disease and making a person better by giving them a pharmaceutical. I thought it would be satisfying enough to be a researcher, until I got into graduate school and saw that I wanted to be the one giving the agents and seeing the response.
I didn’t even know what pharmacology was until my third year of college. My chemistry professor saw that I was interested in physiology and biochemistry. It struck a chord with me to merge those two disciplines and apply it to the human disease condition.
So I decided I wanted to become a clinical pharmacologist, which is essentially a drug development expert. The Navy put me through medical school, and upon graduating, I worked as a primary-care doctor for two years on a ship with 600 other men. I also began my research work in the Navy.
It was during the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Heat stress was a problem for the troops in the desert. I studied to see if there was a way to decrease the body temperature of the soldiers if they got overheated. We found some medicines that would be safe and effective.
Eventually, I became intrigued by the Food and Drug Administration and its power to make decisions on medicines. It’s one thing to be writing the book, but the FDA gets to be the book critic, so to speak.
I spent six years there working in infectious disease or oncology review. The neat thing about being a clinical pharmacologist is that it’s a broad specialty that lets you be involved with different types of products.
I was on the receiving end of two applications that ended up being approved by the FDA. One treated the infectious disease hepatitis C, and the other treated colon cancer. That was my proudest work — to be on the team that approves a new product that allows people to live longer.
I left the FDA and went into industry, working at various companies in vaccines and products for infectious disease and oncology. I was positioned at the very end of development and application for FDA approval.
Via: washingtonpost.com