Profile

I live and work in Ware, Hertfordshire along with my partner who also works for the same company (it’s where we met).  We have no pets unless you include the birds (and squirrel) who come visiting our feeder – they are very greedy!  Outside of work I’m a very keen kayaker and provide coaching to the clubs I belong to as well as going on trips to very wet, cold remote parts of the country.

Drugs that are available to help make someone well or relieve a symptom from an illness or disease take a long time to get to patients and we are all ultimately going to be patients sometime in our lives. The work that I do as a pharmaceutical microbiologist helps support bridging the gap from when a substance is discovered to getting it to patients. This involves working with lots of different drug project teams trying to understand what it is they are trying to make and for who. Once I know this, I can learn what the risks are to the patient from the product, the manufacturing process and the environment after which I can then make suggestions on how to control these risks. This is the easy bit!

The harder part is taking all this information and sending it to different authorities who control the approval of new drugs for patients. This information, along with information generated by the drug project team, gets brought together into several documents which get reviewed and finally approved before being sent to various authorities around the world. These are organisations like the FDA in the USA, the MHRA in the UK and the EMA in the EU but there are many, many more! These organisations then review these documents and frequently, very, very frequently, send technical questions back to us to answer which we do. If they are satisfied with our answer, they will then approve the file and issue a licence to allow us to market the drug that has been developed. Simple really!