{"295721":{"#nid":"295721","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Peeking Inside the Pharmaceutical Industry","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EStudents travel to Puerto Rico for an intimate look at drug design, development and delivery.\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ELizzette G\u00f3mez Ramos took the scenic route to see what was happening in her backyard. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBorn and raised in Puerto Rico, she earned her B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayag\u00fcez, where she acquired a keen interest in drug development, right there in the midst of one of the planet\u2019s busiest pharmaceutical manufacturing clusters, on her home island, which would seem serendipitous except that Lizzette never saw a bit of it. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThen she enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she\u2019s pursuing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, and became involved with the Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery (CD4) at Georgia Tech. Now she is intimately familiar with her commonwealth\u2019s pharmaceutical community, thanks to an annual program that gives Georgia Tech students a unique perspective on the pharmaceutical industry. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFor the past eight years, a rotating collection of undergraduate and graduate students have spent spring break touring drug and medical device manufacturing plants in Puerto Rico, part of a semester-long class called Drug Design, Development and Delivery (named after the CD4). For the past two years, Ramos served as teaching assistant (TA) on the five-day trip. \u201cThey know I am from Puerto Rico, and also that I have experience in the pharmaceutical industry,\u201d says G\u00f3mez Ramos, who had two internships and one year of full-time employment for pharma kingpin Merck. \u201cBut that was in New Jersey, not Puerto Rico, so this was all new to me.\u201d \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIt\u2019s new to pretty much all of the students, because there aren\u2019t any other trips like this one, says Mark Prausnitz, director of CD4 (one of research centers supported by the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience). \u201cI\u2019d been doing pharmaceutical research for a long time when I first went. I\u2019d never been in facilities like these places, it opened up my world in a dramatic way, which is why I\u2019m convinced that this program is a critical and unique piece of pharmaceutical education at Georgia Tech.\u201d \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFrom the outset, the trip was designed to provide a singular experience, offering massive industry access in one geographic place. Puerto Rico is a world leader in drug manufacturing, and students get a glimpse into a wide range of industry activity, visiting pharmaceutical and medical device juggernauts like Amgen, Medtronic, Merck and Pfizer, to name a few. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cMy friends joke that I\u2019m just going home for a vacation,\u201d says G\u00f3mez Ramos. \u201cBut it\u0027s a very packed agenda. We\u2019re seeing several companies a day, morning to night, so there\u2019s barely time to do anything else.\u201d \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESo, she had no time to visit family, until after the five-day field trip, which always includes time for a few cultural activities \u2013 visiting a bioluminescent bay, the Arecibo Observatory (home of the world\u2019s largest single-dish radio telescope), historic Old San Juan, and also the Bacardi distillery, which offers a different kind of glimpse into biotechnology. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely about as biotech as you can get, but of course it\u2019s completely different from pharmaceuticals,\u201d says Andreas Bommarius, associate director of CD4, who organized the pharmaceutical trip program with Prausnitz. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cOne of the best things about this program, I think, is that students get exposed to international competition in the pharma arena. The three major centers of manufacturing are Puerto Rico, Ireland and Singapore, and the constant repositioning of manufacturing is a dynamic picture,\u201d Bommarius says, noting that Puerto Rico has chipped away at its industry incentive package. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAs a result, Georgia Tech students have visited some plants that are no longer in operation, while other companies continue to invest heavily in Puerto Rico.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E \u201cWe saw a production line that was state of the art, but demand was so low they almost never turned it on at one facility,\u201d Bommarius says. \u201cAnd we also saw Amgen, which is a jewel, their most important facility outside of their headquarters in Thousand Oaks (Calif.). We see a tremendous diversity of pharmaceutical manufacturing operations.\u201d \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EPrausnitz and Bommarius designed the D4 class to be interdisciplinary, inviting students from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. The trip contingent is limited to about two dozen students who get a rare, up-close and comprehensive glimpse of the industry at some the world\u2019s top manufacturing facilities. \u201cThe trip was an excellent opportunity to see and learn about an industry that is typically pretty veiled, to say the least,\u201d says Ashley Zuniga, a fourth-year biochemistry student. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EShe already was interested in drug design before taking the spring semester class, and the Puerto Rico trip enhanced her interest (after grad school, she plans to apply to some of the companies she visited). But Zuniga seemed to get more of what was unfamiliar. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cAs a biochemist, not an engineer, I don\u2019t get much of an opportunity to see or study chemical plants, process control, or large scale industry processes,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I was able to get pretty solid exposure to all of that and more during this trip. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cMy favorite was Medtronic, because you could see every step of diabetes insulin pumps being made, by hand, from electronic components to casings to testing. I now know that I would definitely like more engineering to be a part of my future career.\u201d \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThough she officially is considered a TA, G\u00f3mez Ramos serves as trip coordinator, occasionally as translator, and she is the perfect cultural liaison. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cI\u2019ve been lucky that they trust my decisions on where to stay, where to eat, where we should go, and not go,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m also the timekeeper, I keep us on schedule, and we have a busy schedule to keep, a lot of companies to visit.\u201d \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EEven with her experience in the pharmaceutical industry, G\u00f3mez Ramos says she got valuable exposure to the industry in a new way, a useful glimpse into real-world applications that will help in her research, wherever that leads. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u201cPerhaps I\u2019ll be a professor at the University of Puerto Rico,\u201d she says, not yet sure what her professional future will be, but with a very clear understanding of what it\u2019s like to live where the stuff gets made.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":[{"value":"Students travel to Puerto Rico for an intimate look at drug design, development and delivery."}],"field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EStudents travel to Puerto Rico for an intimate look at drug design, development and delivery.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Students travel to Puerto Rico for an intimate look at drug design, development and delivery."}],"uid":"27195","created_gmt":"2014-05-08 08:07:19","changed_gmt":"2022-05-26 17:09:36","author":"Colly Mitchell","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2014-05-08T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2014-05-08T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"295761":{"id":"295761","type":"image","title":"Map of Puerto Rico","body":null,"created":"1449244514","gmt_created":"2015-12-04 15:55:14","changed":"1475894995","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:49:55","alt":"Map of Puerto Rico","file":{"fid":"199395","name":"bigstock-outline-map-of-puerto-rico-wit-square.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/bigstock-outline-map-of-puerto-rico-wit-square_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/bigstock-outline-map-of-puerto-rico-wit-square_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":2123106,"path_740":"http:\/\/tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/bigstock-outline-map-of-puerto-rico-wit-square_0.jpg?itok=Tp3uRu9f"}},"295711":{"id":"295711","type":"image","title":"Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery (CD4) - Annual trip to Puerto Rico to tour drug and medical device manufacturing plants","body":null,"created":"1449244514","gmt_created":"2015-12-04 15:55:14","changed":"1475894995","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:49:55","alt":"Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery (CD4) - Annual trip to Puerto Rico to tour drug and medical device manufacturing plants","file":{"fid":"199393","name":"observatory_1.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/observatory_1_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/observatory_1_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":5748297,"path_740":"http:\/\/tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/observatory_1_0.jpg?itok=0KeiRMyz"}}},"media_ids":["295761","295711"],"related_links":[{"url":"http:\/\/cd4.gatech.edu\/","title":"CD4 website"}],"groups":[{"id":"1292","name":"Parker H. 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