'It's very rewarding to see the difference you can make': Work in health sciences is the sum of all its parts
One rewarding aspect of working in health sciences is the systemic change that can happen
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Making the world better, making it healthier, making your communities stronger—working in health sciences to advance disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment is all about having an impact on people’s lives. Arima Ventin has been fueled by her passion to make a difference to people “one patient at a time,” she says. “When you’re involved in healthcare, it’s very rewarding to see the difference you can make.”
She practiced as a pharmacist in community settings and hospitals and now leads market access and government affairs at AbbVie, a research-based pharma company. Check out her LinkedIn page and you’ll see she’s hiring.
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“There’s never been a better time to join the industry because there is so much innovation happening. I would also say there are so many different aspects to the industry, whether you’re in an early start-up or healthcare delivery or you’re involved in a large international biopharmaceutical company like AbbVie, there are so many parts to it. But what’s really exciting is to see how all these parts come together.”
Pharma economics works to boost healthcare efficiency
She talks about pharma economics and the need to make systems more efficient for drug approvals and time to market to reach patients in Canada, and the speed of advancements in science and technology that are changing drug research and development, opening the door for innovation.
On that note, AbbVie employs 1,100 people in Canada in different aspects of the business. The company looks for people who have a diverse set of skills including agility to adapt to change in such an evolving space. “It’s rare someone stays in one role for their career in our industry,” Ventin says, emphasizing the breadth of health sciences and movement to different roles. Having a strong science background is important, especially for working in the medical department. There are also roles in finance, communications and highly technical areas like medical affairs that looks at strategy and includes data science and artificial intelligence.
“We need to be able to have access to data in a way that you can actually analyze it. And today across the country our systems are not well connected,” she explains of the goal to speed up information sharing to become more efficient in areas of medication access and care delivery.
Health sciences sector taps into the power and potential of AI for analytics
“AI can’t really replace people in all areas, but what it can do is help make our decisions faster. AI can pull together data and do the analytics to make better treatment decisions for patients or even better decisions for society on funding or care pathways. So, I think that’s a whole area that we’re probably very early in.”
Ventin says another rewarding aspect of working in health sciences is the systemic change that can happen. You learn about the unmet needs of practitioners and patients and gaps in care, so you can work toward bringing stakeholders together to help make change happen. As she points out, there are only so many doctors in the country, so how can health sciences help these physicians to work as efficiently as possible, choosing the medicine that’s going to work well the first time instead of having to go through other medicines or care pathways that may not be suitable or effective.
“So how do we shorten those wait times so that we’re using all of our resources, whether they’re nurses, physicians, procedures and hospitals, efficiently to do better at keeping people healthy?” She says her company aims to bring 44 new products or indications (new drugs or procedures that offer additional application beyond their original use) to market in core areas of immunology, neuroscience, oncology and eye care.
Job satisfaction has a lot to do with helping patients and families
Working toward change can be dramatic when you can see how it affects a person’s life or family’s life. For example, in the complex area of mental health there’s no one answer for everyone, but the product Vraylar (cariprazine) for the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be transformative for patients, their caregivers, their families and society, she says.
“We know the cost of mental health, both in terms of quality of life and the economic impact. When we were able to bring this medicine to Canada to move through the process of approval and, very importantly, to move through the process of reimbursement, it’s inspiring to see and to receive feedback from patients and physicians that nothing had worked for them and now this product is making a difference. They’re able to get back to work. They’re able to interact with family members. They’re able to contribute and feel like themselves again.”
At AbbVie and the broader health sciences sector, job opportunities in research and development in the medical area are growing quickly to keep pace with all the projects and clinical trials. AbbVie alone has 59 active clinical trials ongoing at more than 500 Canadian clinical trial sites supporting over 3,000 patients. The company is championing the need for health equity, looking at diversity in race, underserved rural populations and gender, which is key as well because historically men have been the focus of clinical trials.
Health equity is integral to today’s research and development
“From a diversity standpoint, we want to make sure that we are hitting the mark in our clinical trials. That’s coupled with our very strong commitment to doing so with a high degree of integrity and safety,” Ventin notes of working with the best researchers to bring research or clinical trials to people that we need to learn more about, like women, pediatrics or special populations. A good example, she says, is the research chair in ethnodermatology that AbbVie supports at the University of Toronto to look at the needs of all ethnicities in dermatology training and care.
Diversity is an overarching theme of bringing in new talent to the company as well to boost diverse thought and leadership in decision-making. Ventin comes back to transferable skills in an evolving industry and the need for new thinking and innovation. “The more diversity you can bring into decision-making, whether it’s people from different educational backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, or even different types of communities where they live, you start to have a different type of discussion,” she says. “I think Canadians are well set up in terms of being able to contribute to the life sciences sector.”
