It's always interesting to change jobs and leave the first company you work for after leaving school. Each company approaches the same problem with different approaches, and it's always an adjustment to how another company operates. But there is always a motivation to make the move, and it's not until after we've crossed to the other side we learn whether our intuition and analysis was how we imagined it.
I've been with my current company for about 6 months now and am finally getting a hang of how the business is executed and the expectations of scientists. Even though the industry aims to deliver medicines to patients, there's always a balance of operation excellence (speed to patient) versus scientific excellence (best science at first filing), and my former company are leaders in the former and my current company are leaders in the latter. This leads to different questions needing to be answered, with my questions changing from those such as "what questions about this molecule need to be answered to enable clinical trials?" to "what levers can we pull in cell culture to create the best possible process?" I think deciding which is the better approach is more a matter of personal preference and there is a fairly narrow range in balancing the two to be able to successfully deliver medicines to patients, and learnings can be taken to improve how other companies in the industry operate.
For me this is an important opportunity to learn more about the nuances of cell culture and become a contributor to our knowledge of cell culture. At the same time there are a number of operational inefficiencies where I believe there can be significant gains in efficiency. However the balance is to not stifle scientific innovation in the name of speed at all costs. What I can say if that I've learned significantly more about the ins and outs of cell culture in the short time I've been at this company and there have been many opportunities to explore exciting side projects beyond delivering the pipeline.
So what does this hold? The view might be more short-sighted since this is mostly only a plan for the next few years. The grass is greener-for now-since the scientific aspects of cell culture was an important driver, in addition to a few other factors. I don't have delusions of this being a long-term move, partially because the locale is not ideal. So maybe the grass isn't greener everywhere; maybe I need to keep the neighbor's dog from peeing on my lawn both figuratively and literally.
