How to Become a Medical Science Liaison
The medical science liaison (MSL) professional focuses on providing scientific and educational support and collaboration between healthcare stakeholders like physicians, patients and and bipharmaceutical companies.
PhDs have faced tremendous entry barriers to the MSL career for two major reasons. First, most PhDs lack clinical (or patient care) experience that are inherent in PharmD and MD training programs. Most PhD research projects deal with cells and mice — considered preclinical by industry standards. Second, and perhaps more insidious, is the perception that "PhDs lack people skills". People conjure stereotypes of scientists in white lab coats as eccentric, antisocial or lacking in social graces. Unfortunately, this perception also exists within biopharma, and PhDs aiming for alternative careers beyond the bench have to be prepared to "explain themselves".
PhDs who want to become a MSL can maximize their chances of breaking into this highly competitive career by doing the following:
Understand the mindset of MSL hiring managers
The biggest complaint I've heard over the years of coaching and mentoring aspiring MSLs is "they want MSL experience, but I can't get that unless I become a MSL". I've heard this so many times that I titled my MSL career book, "All MSLs Started with No MSL Experience!" This catch-22 situation has evolved because many entry level MSL candidates don’t possess many of the basic skill sets that hiring managers are looking for. Consequently, hiring managers prefer experienced MSL candidates because they can be reasonably assured that person understands the “ins” and “outs” of what it takes to be an MSL.
Invest in tools, resources, and coaching
Perform due diligence and read everything you can about the MSL role. This six -figure career niche is extremely small, which makes the job market fiercely competitive. There is a dearth of "free" MSL resources because service providers in this niche make their living by focusing on the biopharma clients with big budgets.
Become a master networker
Networking is your only option to get into the minds of hiring managers or learn what you need to know if you can't or aren't willing to invest in tools, resources, or coaching related to the MSL career. You can start with your school's career center or the local postdoc association and see what resources may be available related to an MSL career.
Scientific complexity is increasing in treatment options as biologics are entering markets long dominated by small molecules. This is matched with cross-sector collaboration complexity, as biopharmaceutical companies navigate regulatory and public scrutiny. The MSL profession is only 40 years old, but the MSL role is becoming one of the "rising stars" of biopharma's career offerings. Look for the life sciences industry to hire increasing numbers of MSLs as more biotechnology products enter the market.
To learn more about the MSL career pathway please check out Jane’s new book, "All MSLs Started with No MSL Experience! The Guide to Becoming a Medical Science Liaison" or visit the MSL Jobs website to look for employment opportunities.
After yesterday's post about career planning for life scientists, one of my soon to be former students in the Fundamentals of Bioscience Program aptly pointed out that my readers might have benefitted more if I had, in fact, offered information about alternate career possibilities for bioscientists. I don't want the student to get too overconfident but I had the same thought immediately after I uploaded the post. 
Yesterday, I gave a lecture entitled “Alternate Careers: Taking the Road Less Traveled” to over 100 members of the University of Pennsylvania’s Biomedical Graduate Student Association. As always, there were many good questions and comments during and after the presentation. Some of the career anecdotes offered by several of the students reminded me of a conversation that I had several weeks ago with one of my Fundamentals of Bioscience students—I teach a Product Development and Regulatory Affairs course in the program—who refreshed my memory about a typical graduate student approach to career development and job searching. “We don’t think about jobs or our careers until we begin writing our PhD theses” she said. “Until then, our advisers don’t talk about careers or jobs and only bring it up because our funding will run out” she added. Admittedly, I had forgotten this because so many years have passed since my graduate student days. That said, it forced me to consider how much the life sciences job market has changed since I was graduate student and how vitally important it is for today’s graduate students to think about and possibly explore different career options throughout the course of their graduate training..jpg){kind=logo}
Vincent Racaniello,
I just returned from the 
I am sitting in Newark Airport waiting for my flight to San Diego which, not surprisingly, has been delayed for about 2 hours. As you might have guessed from the title of this post, I am on my way to the 2008 FASEB Career Development Symposium which is run every year at the annual FASEB meeting. 
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I read an interesting article by G. Pascal Zachary in the Sunday Business Section of the NY times entitled 
Although industry and academia share a common bond (no pun intended), which is obviously science, the lexicons of these two seemingly similar but parallel worlds are markedly different. For example, do you know what the acronyms IND, NDA, cGMP, cGLP, BLA, CTD, PK or PD stand for? If you cannot decipher any of them, you ought to forget about getting a job in industry and stay in academia. If you know what 95 % or less of them mean, I highly recommend that you get some additional training before applying for your first industrial position. If you are one of the lucky few who recognized and correctly interpreted 100% of the acronyms, you are either working in industry or recently completed some postgraduate training in drug development and regulatory affairs. The point that I am trying to make is that you cannot possibly expect to get a job in industry if can’t speak the language that you need to know in order to succeed! As the old saying goes “You need to learn how to walk before you can run”. 
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I received a call the other day from a former biotechnology master’s degree student of mine who recently secured a job at a local biotech/medical device company. She called to inquire about training for her laboratory co-workers in 
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Regulatory affairs is one of the hottest and fasting growing career tracks in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical devices industries. The trouble is,there is very little formal training available to prepare individuals for careers in regulatory affairs. Historically, most regulatory affairs professionals honed their skills through on-the-job training. This meant that the only way to pursue a career in regulatory affairs was to first get hired at a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company and then transfer into the regulatory affairs department to learn your craft. Not surprisingly, due to expansive growth of the biotech and medical devices industries, there are ongoing shortages of regulatory affairs professionals, most notably in the area of regulatory writing. In an attempt to deal with these shortages, a number of universities including 
As many of you may know, I sometimes moonlight as a medical writer to put food on the table to feed my family. Several graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have approached me at career fairs and asked “How do I become a medical writer?” Until now, I really did not have a good answer to that question (maybe because I do not know how I became a medical writer?). That said, a colleague of mine, 
Frequently, students who I teach in the NY Biotechnology Center's "Fundamentals for Biotechnology Certificate Program" and the "Georgetown Biotechnology Masters Program" ask me about internship opportunities. My lack of knowledge regarding student internships led me to check out what type of internship opportunities exist at various government agencies. Lo and behold, 
Those of you who are old enough may remember a time when a good medicinal chemistry group was crucial to the success of any pharmaceutical company. For those of you who don’t know, the job of a medicinal chemist is to use traditional organic chemistry to create variants of promising lead compounds with the hope of identifying an NME with optimized therapeutic properties. Much of the art associated with medicinal chemistry was lost over the past decade because of the increased emphasis placed combinatorial chemistry. Not surprisingly, as the interest in combinatorial chemistry grew, there as a concomitant decrease in the number of medicinal chemistry jobs. Despite all of the hype and fanfare surrounding combinatorial chemistry, it has not delivered on its promise of creating “hundreds on new molecular entities each year”. Instead, combinatorial chemistry has just become another tool in the drug discovery and development armamentarium.
My colleagues on the 
Over the past few days, I received several inquiries regarding training for individuals interested in pursuing careers in medical writing and medical communications. The good news is that both of these fields are exploding and there simply are not enough qualified candidates to fill all of the positions that are open. The bad news is that there is very little formal training or instruction to prepare folks for jobs in these fields. 