By Jane Chin, Ph.D. Medical science liaisons (MSL) have many aliases: medical science managers, regional scientific managers, medical information scientists, scientific liaisons (you can see more job titles here).
Whatever the moniker, a medical science liaison’s critical function remains the same: to establish trust and credibility from which research collaborations flourish, and do this in an efficient and effective manner.
This is why I view MSLs as knowledge-based “catalysts” in the healthcare industry.
Many Faces – One Critical Role
Research collaborations with principle investigators (also called “thought leaders” or “opinion leaders”) are as important to a drug company as drug development opportunities are important to a thought leader. This symbiotic collaboration strives toward an understanding of a disease state, dissection of the roles of classes of drug compounds in the treatment of a disease state, and ultimately contributing to the scientific body of evidence for a biological pathway. Since research investigators are widely disseminated, medical liaisons are thus distributed to serve as points-of-contact between scientific pioneers and industry.
Depending on the company, the medical liaison group may be as few as a handful of individuals to a team of formidable size (over 50). As a result, geography differs from company to company, and so does the amount of traveling required for a liaison. All liaisons should expect to travel out of state at least a few times year – to attend medical meetings or company business meetings. Some liaisons are road warriors, traveling 80% or more.
The main focus of a medical liaison’s responsibility is to facilitate and establish research opportunities between his company and a research investigator. A medical liaison must therefore be able to (physically) get in front of a researcher, address questions on her company’s research goals and product pipeline, and have the capacity to provide necessary processes that a researcher needs to initiate collaboration.
What makes a liaison more than mere “technical support” or even “super-rep” is his ability to engage in meaningful scientific discussions with the researcher, both about the disease state as well as on the scientific evidence available. Medical liaisons should engage in a peer-to-peer discussion with the investigator, to be able to challenge and cultivate scientific ideas in a discussion. While a medical liaison does not solicit research ideas, she serves as a catalyst in generating research proposals with the researcher. Active scientific exchange leads to unearthing of questions and to research that remains to be done to elucidate pathways contributing to physiological phenomena.
What’s in a Degree?
An advanced-degree requirement (PhD, PharmD, MD) comes into play based on the previous paragraph. While a doctorate may not be an ironclad requirement, companies often set such requirements due to an increased likelihood for such liaisons to be perceived as scientifically credible by the medical community. In fact, for many companies, a doctorate has become an absolute requirement for a medical liaison position. This trend is unlikely to diminish particularly as the pool of doctorate-level medical liaison applicants increases.
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Tags: advanced degrees, KOLs, relationship capital, thought leaders
