Idea to Innovation

Catalog description

The pharmaceutical industry comprises an incredibly diverse team of thinkers, including accountants and biochemists, who are all on a quest to improve human health. The development of medical treatments relies on pivotal insights from the scientific laboratory, but turning these ideas into practical medical innovations requires the solving of many problems outside of the scientific field. Through the examination of historical and contemporary case studies, this course will investigate the nature of science as it is practiced in the real world. How are problems identified and ideas generated and refined? What political and sociological challenges does the industry encounter? Who pays for all of this? By exploring growth in the pharmaceutical industry from the inside, students in this class will gain a deeper understanding of both science and business and how these disciplines interact in order to enhance and extend human life.