THE ART OF SCIENCE

Thirty years since leaving Strathallan James Tornos (R '92) is currently working as Vice President for Sourcing & Enterprise Services for Pfizer Research & Development (R&D). We caught up with him to find out more about the diverse range of projects he has worked on and how a career in science has been a journey of innovation, new discoveries and creativity.

Tell us a little bit about yourself

I currently live in Madison, Connecticut, USA, halfway between Boston and New York, and am married to Joanne. We have two boys, Daniel and Jonathan, aged 13 and 11.

In terms of ambition, my goal has been to continuously learn, gain new experiences and help develop my colleagues to grow. My first real ambition, probably when I was about 16 years old, was to become CEO of ICI. It turns out that when I started my career working for Astra Pharmaceuticals, Astra was soon acquired by Zeneca, which was formerly ICI. So, at least I was working in the right company, but CEO – well, I think I still have some way to go!

Travelling and spending time with the family, skiing and golf pretty much sums up my interests, we are fortunate that we have extreme seasonality (hot and cold) where we live, so the ability to ski and golf is readily available and sometimes in the same season. We love living in New England, coasts and mountains are abundant and there are some fantastic places to visit and holiday.

The Strathallan Years

I loved my time at Strath, I was a pupil there between 1985 and 1992 and I believe that my time at Strath significantly influenced my outlook and what I wanted in life. Independence is probably the biggest theme that I take from my time at Strath, working through life’s challenges, being self-motivated, developing new skills are all traits that I think I developed whilst at school. We had great balance between academics and sport and there was a trust that existed, even while we were relatively young. The teachers really wanted us to succeed and provided a learning environment that certainly helped me move on to university. David Barnes was always a very inspirational role model, a teacher, house master, and coach, he took the time to support and encourage pupils to maximize their potential, I look back at this time at Strath, not just as education, but life training. I also recall there only being 3 of us pupils in Maths class, that meant we all pushed each other and had to keep up with each other, and it was just the same on the playing field, it was easy to stay motivated under those circumstances.

When I reflect on Strath, the first thing that comes to mind is the friendships that were created. As the years go by, It may be 5-10 years that go by between seeing these friends, but when we get together, it is just like yesterday when we were at school. It is great that we can stay in touch so easily and see what everyone is up to, but there is nothing better than getting together and rehashing those memories from the past.

I like to think that Strath gave me balance and perspective; knowing when to push a little harder and strive for a goal, but also allowing yourself time to relax, unwind and do something you enjoy – it is critically important to find this balance to recharge. I think the pandemic has really reinforced this need to find the right balance for your mental and physical well-being.

A Career In Science

From a young age, I always gravitated to Maths and Science, always more comfortable with numbers and problem solving then creativity. I pondered a career in medicine for a while, but eventually settled on pure science and chemistry to pursue as a degree, but not really knowing at that time where that could take me.

I studied Chemistry at the University of Newcastle and for a couple of summers I worked in the labs doing some research which was a great way to see if this was something I enjoyed. It wasn’t as easy as I expected, you would spend time planning and researching experiments and then they wouldn’t work out and you had to figure out why they didn’t work and pursue different approaches. The problem solving was very appealing and there was a great sense of satisfaction when the experiment did work and especially when you made a new chemical compound, that quite possibly was the first time that compound had even been made, it was truly unique.

Having that experience of performing some independent research, that really gave me a taste for doing a PhD, so for 3 years I was a full-time researcher at Nottingham University. Studying for a PhD in organic chemistry was entirely laboratory based with significant independence to research and design your own approaches to tackling the problem at hand. My research was focused towards naturally occurring products from marine origin, essentially trying to synthesize some very complex chemical molecules and develop new chemical reactions in the process. Doing this research was a roller coaster, you could go months without a breakthrough and sometimes it felt hard to keep trying new approaches and often feeling that you were not accomplishing anything. This was certainly a lesson in perseverance, patience and tenacity.

I needed to make some key decisions during my final year of my PhD, continue with research by going to do a postdoctorate fellowship at another university, quite possibly in the USA or apply for industry positions. I was approaching 6 years at university at this time, so I decided to apply for industry positions with a preference for the pharmaceutical industry. At that time, there was a good system for recruitment into the industry, but it was highly competitive due to a lot of merger and acquisition activity within the pharma industry. I was recruited by Astra Pharmaceuticals, a Swedish company and within 6 weeks of starting my career it was announced that Zeneca would acquire Astra to become AstraZeneca, the third largest global pharmaceutical company. I worked as a Process Development Scientist, responsible for designing and developing new chemical routes to manufacture potential new drugs for respiratory diseases. It was a great first role, working

Phorboxazole – A novel marine naturally occurring product that I worked on during my PhD collaboratively with many other scientists and engineers and gaining many different experiences from working out challenges with tonne scale manufacturing processes in a plant in Sweden to working on tight timelines to deliver drug substance for first in human clinical trials. The variety of the challenges was vast working on different projects at various stages of development.

Throughout my time at AZ, I was fortunate to travel and collaborate with many different partners and suppliers, which really gave me an insight into the importance of supply chain. Companies like AZ did not have the capacity or desire to develop and manufacture everything in house, so I had great exposure to the reliance on outsourcing and developing partnerships. This experience piqued my interest in being at the forefront of where science meets business, and I was able to take a role responsible for AZ’s outsourcing strategy in supply of active drug ingredient for clinical supply for all development programs.

Joining Pfizer

After 8 years at AZ, I joined Pfizer’s Kent, UK site with responsibility for scientific services sourcing & procurement. Over the years my role has expanded beyond just chemistry applications to support a broad range of scientific disciplines that are all critically important in the drug discovery and development process. This has provided me insights and exposure to numerous scientific activities, in which my role is to help scientific leaders evaluate and access external capabilities, capacity and new technologies that support their divisions by developing strategic business models for outsourced scientific activities. Pfizer, too, has undertaken mergers and acquisitions. In 2009, Pfizer acquired Wyeth and this brought a whole new paradigm of novel drug programs (biologics and vaccines) to Pfizer. This diversification within Pfizer provided the opportunity for me to relocate from the UK to the USA and provided me opportunities to support different parts of the business. I often surprise myself when I look back and think about the diverse nature of projects and engagements that I have supported over the last 16 years. I feel lucky, as the range of different projects and experiences has made it feel like very different roles and new experiences over the years, with many opportunities to learn and grow, most notably over the last 2 pandemic years. meant creating deals with our supply chain partners in support of billions of doses, before we even knew we had a viable product. We had to convince our partners to move at the same speed and make investments in their capacity and develop business models that allowed them to benefit from a successful vaccine, but also protected them from the associated risks of developing pharmaceutical products. I am extremely proud and grateful that I had the opportunity to be involved in Pfizer’s journey to launch the first COVID-19 vaccine and gain from this unique experience. What advice would you give to anyone who wants to work in STEM?

I am currently Vice President for Sourcing & Enterprise Services for Pfizer Research & Development (R&D). I lead an organization responsible for sourcing, contracting and managing approx. $3Bn of annual spend with suppliers in support of R&D activities. We support thousands of scientists, engineers and program managers working in 6 different therapeutic areas (Oncology, Internal Medicine, Rare Diseases, Immunology & Inflammation, Anti Virals and Vaccines). The work we support spans from very early, innovative research of new disease areas though clinical development and into commercialization and manufacturing. Because of the number and range of programs that are being supported and the different stages of pharmaceutical development, my team and I are exposed to a vast array of different scientific approaches and technologies and it is my teams role to enable Pfizer scientists to leverage the external eco-system of scientific providers by engaging the latest new and emerging proprietary technologies and accessing additional external capacity for research and manufacture to balance internal capabilities. We do this with a close focus towards speed, compliance and driving financial optimization.

What are the latest trends in the industry you are in and how do you harness them?

The growth and proliferation of new scientific technologies has allowed for many, many new ways to develop innovative medicines. There is a greater focus on computational sciences and artificial intelligence. These tools can be applied across the discovery, development and manufacturing disciplines and have the real potential to greatly accelerate the time it takes to discover and develop drugs. Another big industry trend over the last 10 years has been precision or personalized medicine. Precision medicine uses information about genetics and genomics to provide a precise path to medical care for an individual, essentially this means that a drugs can be designed for certain patient populations. The increase in computational power has had a significant impact to allow for much greater speed and lower cost in genome sequencing, such that at the start of the century, it cost hundred of millions of dollars to sequence the human genome over many years and now a human genome can be sequenced for thousands of dollars in a matter of days. Working closely with our scientific communities and profiling those technologies that are providing impactful innovation and those that are not helps us to anticipate the next trends and allows us to develop greater strategic partnerships in those areas that are most beneficial to our development efforts.

What have been your greatest challenges and your top highlights so far in your career and what impact did the pandemic have?

I would say that I was very fortunate during the pandemic to be in a role that easily allowed me to pivot to a fully remote working environment and my basement became my new office. I was used to a high degree of flexible working pre-pandemic, so the switch was not that challenging having already had familiarity with online/remote meetings. It was, however, always going to be somewhat challenging with the adjustment to the whole family being at home, not leaving the house to go to school or work and having to home school the children, but as a family we worked well to balance everyone’s needs and were fortunate that we only had a few months of fully remote schooling.

A career in STEM is the starting point to new discoveries and innovation. The beauty of a science career is that there is great potential to be working in areas that previously did not exist. That seemed very exciting to me and this allows there to be an element of art within science. At the start of my career, I would never have considered thinking of science being about creativity. There are so many branches of science and many are very transferrable, which allows someone with a scientific training to move and explore other areas within pure science, but also within business, manufacturing and operations. I think the pandemic and the response from the pharmaceutical industry is a great advertisement for a career in science, as Pfizer likes to say “Science will Win”!

In terms of work, what helped in the early days of the pandemic was having a sense of purpose towards pursuing a vaccine against COVID-19. It was a massive exercise in reprioritizing and focusing on the work that was most critical. Being part of the vaccine team is my biggest career highlight, there was always going to be a number of challenges to overcome, but the collaborative team work really did help us believe that we could be successful and strive towards goals that had never been achieved before. As a company, we were fortunate to have an inspiring and courageous CEO who removed hurdles and previous stage gates in order to be able to move at lightspeed. For me and my team, this James