Iain Webb

When Iain Webb left his job as medical director at Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for Millennium Pharmaceuticals three and a half years ago, he found industry to be "a different world," he recalls.

"In my previous position, I had worked on a wide variety of clinical research trials from the manufacturing end to the clinical end, so I had an idea about how a clinical group functions at a company," Webb, 41, says. But other aspects of his new job as associate director of oncology clinical development--including working with the company's development, commercial, and public affairs departments--were uncharted territory.

"Those areas were new to me, areas where my knowledge was really from what I read in the newspaper and from people I knew who were in the industry already, so that part was very different," he says.

It didn't take him long to learn. As director of oncology clinical development, a position he was promoted to last year, he currently oversees three separate clinical development programs and also works closely with Millennium's business development group, helping to evaluate licensing opportunities and other potential business moves. He spends much of his time in meetings, working with various teams to estimate the commercial potential of different programs, write protocols for trials, establish timelines and budgets, and ensure that data are properly collected and Food and Drug Administration rules carefully followed.

Webb graduated from McGill University's medical school in Montreal, Canada, in 1987. He completed eight years of postgraduate training in Canada and the US before he joined Dana-Farber's Center for Hematologic Oncology, where he was the principal investigator for seven clinical trials and a coinvestigator for 14 more. He soon became the medical director for Dana-Farber's Cell Manipulation Core Facility, where, among other accomplishments, he established laboratories to produce immunotherapy, stem cell, and gene therapy products.

One of the challenges of industry, Webb notes, is adhering to rigorous deadlines each step of the way. "In academia, timelines are really just based on what the cycle is for submitting your abstract, or getting your presentation ready for the conference, or putting your grant in. Those are the only deadlines you know," he says. "Here, given the complexity of what we do, there are a lot of different timelines going on at the same time and you can't afford to let anything slip, because before you know it, you'll get a snowball effect."

Still, the burden is made lighter by the resources available to scientists working on the industry side, he points out. Some of those resources are financial, but others have more to do with human capital. In industry, "you have a team of people who come from different backgrounds and different areas of expertise who all supplement each other, so when you need to make a decision that would benefit from the input of other physicians...or from a commercial point of view or a finance point of view, you have the right people to make those decisions," says Webb.

-- Kate Fodor