Partners with a Purpose

BY DANIEL P. SMITH

The UIC College of Pharmacy and AbbVie continue to strengthen a relationship that delivers benefits to both sides.

Dr. Tony Hebden of AbbVie

Photo by Barry Donald

Dr. Tony Hebden understands the realities better than most.

As the vice president of Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) at AbbVie, a research-based global biopharmaceutical company, Hebden recognizes the ever-evolving nature of the healthcare landscape and pharmacy’s role in it.

“So, when you look to the future of pharmacy, HEOR’s role will only grow,” says Hebden, who joined North Chicago-based AbbVie in 2013, the same year it spun off from Abbott.

That reality has put AbbVie, which boasts one of the industry’s most active and well-respected HEOR teams, on a constant search for new talent, insights and strategies to build expertise.

“And when we look at our doorstep, we see UIC,” Hebden says.

In recent years, AbbVie and UIC, home to one of the nation’s top pharmacy schools as well as the pioneering Center for Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomic Research (CPR), have become increasingly collaborative and invested partners eager to learn from and grow with one another, especially in the HEOR field.

“We’re certainly strengthening an existing relationship with greater intent and purpose,” Hebden says.

A BURGEONING PARTNERSHIP

Walk through AbbVie’s modern campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs and it’s not difficult to find staff with ties to the UIC College of Pharmacy. College alumni fill roles throughout the AbbVie enterprise – in areas such as research, medical and regulatory affairs and HEOR – while numerous current AbbVie employees are enrolled in the College’s post-graduate or certificate programs as well. Others like Dr. Jeremy Jokinen and Dr. Jay Duhig, PhD ’11 from AbbVie’s pharmacovigilance and patient safety group bring their industry work into UIC classrooms as adjunct faculty at the College.

Dig deeper, though, and there’s plenty more rippling below those surface-level connections.

There are College faculty exploring research collaborations with AbbVie scientists, UIC PharmD students partaking in six-week HEOR experiential rotations and graduate students involved in AbbVie’s summer internship program.

TRAILBLAZING PARTNERS

AbbVie and UIC develop one of the nation’s only fellowships in pharmacovigilance

In addition to their flagship fellowship in health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), AbbVie and the UIC College of Pharmacy have also developed a two-year fellowship in pharmacovigilance.

One of the nation’s few pharmacovigilance fellowships, the pioneering program leverages UIC’s substantial research in drug safety as well as AbbVie’s robust and industry-leading Pharmacovigilance and Patient Safety (PPS) department to provide students a one-of-a-kind, hands-on experience.

UIC PhD student Dr. Chandler Coleman is currently the second such fellow, following in the footsteps of inaugural fellow and PhD candidate Inyoung Lee.

and patient safety research alongside Greg Calip, PharmD ’08, her fellowship director and an assistant professor in the College’s Department of Pharmacy Systems, Outcomes and Policy.

“I had the clinical knowledge, but the fi rst year helped me to develop the more solid research foundation I needed to bring to large-scale projects,” says Coleman, whose efforts along with Calip included investigating the toxic effects of chemotherapy to the heart after treatment.

Having begun year two of her fellowship this past June, Coleman is now working full-time at AbbVie on a project team redesigning the informed consent document used in clinical trials, which includes developing clear and accessible safety language around potential risks to the patient.

“It’s unique to be working on a largescale project with potential global reach,” says Coleman, particularly grateful that she’s being exposed to prospective career opportunities around patient safety.

Coleman’s AbbVie fellowship supervisor Jay Duhig, PhD ’11 says Coleman is gaining valuable training as an independent scientist at AbbVie while also developing the professional skill set she will need to pursue the research questions she’s most passionate about and to tackle some of healthcare’s most daunting problems.

“Patient safety is an area in which pharmacy can do better and Chandler’s work can help show this,” says Duhig, a director in AbbVie’s PPS department and adjunct faculty member at the UIC College of Pharmacy. “This fellowship is a great way to take people with talent and put them in a position to become real change agents.”

For Coleman and future pharmacovigilance fellows, Calip believes the two-year endeavor provides students a rich sense of team science, particularly the interaction between industry and academia, and highlights the interdisciplinary nature of pharmacovigilance, a fast-growing field that includes complementary areas such as health communications, economics, and epidemiology. Most importantly, though, Calip says the fellowship provides students an early opportunity to manage their own projects.

“To gain that leadership experience right away is so important given how leadership is such a sought-after quality in today’s environment,” he says. “Healthcare needs leaders and this fellowship fosters that.”

Walk through AbbVie’s modern campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs and it’s not difficult to find staff with ties to the UIC College of Pharmacy.

There is also a steady stream of idea sharing. AbbVie personnel, for example, have visited UIC to offer presentations on topics such as safety decision analytics, artifi cial intelligence and careers in industry, while a group of UIC faculty and students traveled to AbbVie headquarters on July 12 for discussions around state-of-the art evidence generation, mediation analysis and machine learning applications with members of the company’s HEOR team.

“There’s a consistent exchange of ideas, knowledge and brainstorming about what’s hot in industry and academia,” CPR director Edith Nutescu, PharmD ’94 says.

Adds AbbVie director of HEOR Steve Marx, PharmD ’00: “With HEOR, specifically, there’s not a lot set in stone, which means there’s ample opportunity to try new ideas and learn from each other.”

Perhaps most notably, AbbVie and UIC teamed together in 2016 to offer a joint two-year fellowship in HEOR, one that arms students with the research tools to evaluate economic, humanistic and clinical outcomes of drug therapy. The fellows, up to three at a time, spend their fi rst year at UIC taking classes and training analytically in research methods before applying that knowledge and skillset to a full-time position within AbbVie’s HEOR department in the program’s second year.

“This prepares our fellows to be industry ready,” Nutescu says.

Spurred by the success of the HEOR fellowship, AbbVie and UIC subsequently added a second fellowship focused on pharmacovigilance and drug safety, one of the only such fellowship programs in the U.S.

For College leaders like Nutescu and Dr. Todd Lee, professor and head of the College’s Department of Pharmacy Systems, Outcomes and Policy, both fellowships help the College recruit high-caliber students, provide trainees rich industry experience and deepen activity with a distinguished and progressive industry player.

“These fellowships are a wonderful avenue for our trainees to get industry experience at a notable company right in our own backyard and potentially open up professional opportunities beyond graduation,” Nutescu says.

AbbVie, meanwhile, welcomes the opportunity to bring promising candidates into its system and then expose them to the company’s culture, work and vision. This, Hebden notes, provides the company access to motivated young scientists capable of injecting energy and perspective into AbbVie’s HEOR and drug safety efforts in the present and the future.

“There’s still some mystery about the roles available in industry and these fellowships help us introduce different possibilities to talented individuals intrigued by the opportunities,” Hebden says.

LOOKING TO GROW TOGETHER

Though still a relatively young relationship, leaders at both the College of Pharmacy and AbbVie recognize the benefits and stand eager to develop the partnership.

“To have a world-class college of pharmacy right here, people we know and respect, there’s significant benefit to that,” Hebden says.

The College’s respected researchers in pharmacoepidemiology, pharmacoeconomics and comparativeeffectiveness research, for instance, help to underscore the seriousness and rigor of AbbVie’s HEOR research.

“Having independent researchers working with us reinforces the research data AbbVie is generating,” Hebden says.

For UIC, a strong partnership with AbbVie means access to the brainpower of top HEOR experts who can provide insights on move-ment in the swelling healthcare field, unique training opportunities for students and dialogue capable of sparking new research directions.

“AbbVie is forward-thinking and willing to be an engaged partner in state-of-the-art work, which allows us both to keep up in the latest areas of HEOR and succeed in being the innovative forces we aim to be,” Lee says.

Moving forward, both Nutescu and Lee see opportunities for more robust research collaborations, expanded training programs and heightened information exchange.

“We have a lot of great momentum going with AbbVie and we want to sustain that while continually looking for new ways to grow together and engage with each other,” Lee says.

In just a few years, Marx notes, AbbVie and UIC have progressed from a handful of students on rotation to a dynamic summer internship program to a competitive fellowship and a variety of other collaborative endeavors.

“Who knows what’s next?” Marx says.

Hebden, too, acknowledges the potential possibilities, especially given the fast-moving nature of pharma and HEOR. With HEOR, in particular, requiring a more contemporary focus – HEOR 2.0, Hebden calls it – AbbVie stands committed to creating an interesting, innovative culture grounded in forward-thinking people, evidence-based science that positions AbbVie as an industry leader and thoughtful partnerships that invite additional talent and energy into the fold.

“Our relationship with UIC hits on all three pillars here and we see a lot of opportunity to leverage our worldclass facility at AbbVie with the world-class researchers at UIC to build and expand our relationship in new and exciting ways,” Hebden says.

That could include leveraging the College of Pharmacy’s ties to its partners on the Chicago campus. With Hebden interested in areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data and other novel techniques to analyze and explore massive swaths of data, he sees potential to work with the College of Pharmacy’s allies in engineering and medicine to bring an even greater interdisciplinary spin to current HEOR efforts.

“We are excited to expand our existing partnerships to further build upon our expertise,” Hebden says. “UIC is a large institution and there are various touchpoints between our two organizations that could lead to opportunities for larger synergies and potential on the macro level.”

While the UIC College of Pharmacy’s relationship with AbbVie is particularly pronounced in the fi eld of health economics and outcomes research, UIC alumni inhabit positions across the AbbVie enterprise.