It's like Candy Land with drugs...but not the way you're thinking

The trip to GSK yesterday went well - definitely worth the time. The interesting part ended up being the networking session at the end, and not so much the drug development simulation game. The game is a little hard to describe, but I'll give it a go. First off, it's a board game, and doesn't really involve any actual skill. The woman who developed it described it as being essentially the same as Candy Land, but it's closer to a cross between Candy Land and Monopoly. They sit you at a table with a couple other people (four others, in my case), and your table represents a company. The players break into two teams, representing project teams within the company. The company has a budge of about 200 million dollars or so, which both project teams draw from. Each project team also ends up getting 15-20 "patent years" early in the game, and part of the goal is to retain as many patent years as you can by the time you reach the end, as you get a certain profit based on how many patent years you have remaining. All you end up doing, however, is to move your piece around the board (either by rolling the dice or taking a chance card) and do what it says on the space on which you land. Often, the space just tells you to spend some money and go back to the start. The point of the game, I take it, is to give you a sense of the pitfalls of the drug development process - for example, your time under the patent tends to be largely eaten up by the development process, and most drugs you start with never make it to market. Apparently, they have new employees play the game - maybe so they know what they're getting into. I had hoped that the game might incorporate the skills and knowledge of the players to a greater extent - for example, maybe have a team with grad students from biology, chemistry, business, engineering, and law, and have them work together to walk a fake drug through the development process. That would be a lot harder to put together, I'm sure, and given that this was the first time that GSK has had an education workshop like this (and that the stated goal was just to give us an idea of what the industry and drug development are like), I can see why they set it up that way.

As I alluded to earlier, my favorite part was the networking session. I'm usually not a big fan of those types of things, but I was able to talk to a VP of development who gave me some very interesting and useful information about some of the jobs in drug discovery. Apparently, there are more opportunities for analytical/computational-type people than I had thought. Obviously, my training isn't in those areas, but they are approaches I find interesting - and I'm doing what I can to pick them up.