my name is Danny Halperin and I’m a former employee at Amgen (worked for 4 years in Clinical Immunology’s cell-based assay group), and I have since gone back to graduate school to pursue my Phd at UCLA. While my background is in bench science, in the last year I have become increasingly interested in the business aspects of the bio-pharma industry. In particular, I’m interested in business development, university-industry collaboration, technology commercialization and corporate bio-pharma management in general. Of course, there’s still a good chance I’ll end up back on the R&D side of things when I move on after grad school, but complementing my advanced bio-science training with business/management skills and knowledge just feels more like the kind of “complete” well-rounded training I’m looking for. I have and plan on continuing taking business classes at UCLA and getting involved with the technology transfer office. I would also consider myself a “lifelong student.” I thought about doing an MBA while at Amgen, but at the time I saw a lot of people there already doing this and just going into a purely business/management track didn’t interest me at the time since all of my experience has been in R&D. I still feel this connection for the science I suppose.

So, I’m curious what kinds of responsibilities do you have in your job? Your background seems to be in computers and engineering so how did you get into market analysis? Are you considering doing an MBA? Where do you see your career going? Do you interact with the business development group at Amgen? During my time I saw Amgen go through some changes. Frankly, while I’m still very hopeful for D-mab and Amgen has a wonderful pipeline, I am concerned about the long-term innovative drive of the company. Some of the acquisitions Amgen has made recently appear to be strategically sound, but Genentech seems to still be considered the top dog when it comes to the pure research that drives breakthrough discovery. Hearing about the latest hiring freeze was a bit depressing too.

Thanks for starting this blog.

Danny Halperin