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The UCSF Student Newspaper
Thursday, September 26, 2013
synapse.ucsf.edu
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!
Volume 58, Number 3
NEWS
Life of a Grad Student By Jenny Qi Executive Editor
“H
ow many graduate students are here — a few hundred?” a Dental student recently asked me. You may be surprised to learn that the Graduate Division is the largest school at UCSF, including more than 1,000 students in 26 programs ranging from basic sciences to anthropology. (To compare, there are about 500 medical students.)
Photo by Jeffrey Chen/MS1 The Chancellor’s Reception and New Student Orientation Fair marks the arrival of new students to UCSF each fall. This year the reception was held on September 23 in the Millberry Union Gymnasium. The fair provided a great opportunity to showcase all the UCSF services that enrich UCSF student life.
NEWS
It Takes Two: Academia and the Drug Industry This is the first article in a three-part series about partnerships between private industry and academia.
By Benjamin L. Cohn Staff Writer
T
he number of new drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration per billion dollars spent by the drug industry on research and development has halved approximately every nine years since 1950. Put another way, the cost of bringing a drug to market is soaring: Larger pharmaceuticals now spend at least $5 billion per chemical entity. Such low rates of return on investment have caused companies to drastically cut their own R&D departments and seek creative ways to bolster the efficiency of drug candidate development. One strategy that is gaining momentum is partnerships with academic medical centers. The Bay Area chapter of the Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable (OBR-Bay) recently invited local bio-entrepreneurship leaders to the University of California, San Francisco, to participate in a panel discussion of the conditions leading to the increase in academic-industry partnerships, current models for collaboration and projections for the future.
The panel consisted of Jeffrey Bluestone, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost of UCSF; Corey Goodman, co-founder and Managing Partner of the investment firm venBio; Douglas Crawford, Associate Director of the QB3 Institute for Quantitative Bioscience; and Daria Mochly-Rosen, Director of the SPARK translational science program at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. The discussion was moderated by OBRBay President Nick Mordwinkin. Symbiosis: what can each side offer?
Graduate students are the silent majority, stereotyped as socially awkward humanoids obsessed with science and little else. In truth, grad students are as diverse and complex as their programs. There are triathletes, MDs and Army vets. Grad programs are also uniquely independent, which can be exhilarating but also painfully isolating. In grad school, you learn to identify and tackle important questions, one tiny step at a time. You have the freedom to explore one subject in great depth and with remarkable autonomy. You no longer need to — and cannot — compare yourself to classmates as you separate into different labs. Hours are flexible and post-grad options are endless. These freedoms, however, can be costly. As our paths diverge from those of our classmates, we no longer have a peer group sharing our triumphs or our tribulations. Or so we may believe. Although no two grad experiences are identical, there are many common threads that simply aren’t verbalized. In this new Life of a Grad Student column, we hope to illuminate some of these similarities. Grad students from all walks of life and all stages of their education have agreed to anonymously, candidly speak with us. They’ve shared stories about the difficulties they’ve encountered as well as the great passions driving their work.We hope to highlight the incredible people working in UCSF laboratories. More than that, we hope readers will learn from the experiences of their peers and realize that we are not so isolated from each other after all.
Entering Class of 2011: Third year By Jenny Qi
STUDENT 1 MALE PARNASSUS
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ell us about your experience at UCSF so far. UCSF has a welcoming environment, and they encourage students to leave our mark on the campus, academically and socially. I’ve had a lot of opportunities to get involved with extracurriculars and interact with faculty. There are always a lot of things to do, especially at Parnassus.
STUDENT 2 MALE MISSION BAY
T
ell us about your experience at UCSF so far. At first, I was so professional, 9-5. I felt like a kid, because there were so many “adults,” with families. But I like the separation you get because of that — you go home and you don’t think about it. And UCSF takes care of their grad students. We’re spoiled because we don’t have undergrads.
While the decreasing efficiency of industry R&D to bring new drugs to market is an important factor in the move towards greater collaboration with academia, it is not the whole picture. Jeffrey Bluestone believes that the discovery strategy employed by the drug industry has probably also been a significant contributor, dating back to the sequencing of the human genome. With the genome complete (or nearly complete), pharmaceutical companies Illustration by Jillian Varonin/BMS4 thought all the hard work had been done, and all that remained was to make the drugs. What about your lab experience? How did What about your lab experience? How did Huge investments were made in robotics, you choose your lab? you choose your lab? high-throughput screening and scientific perGreat overall — I’ve gotten a lot of supA lot people feel like whatever choice you
IT TAKES TWO » PAGE 8
GRAD STUDENT 1 » PAGE 6
GRAD STUDENT 2 » PAGE 6