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 ...
