Hear from our scientists

Claude – team leader, high capacity screening Karin – immunologist/cell biologist Kevin – senior statistician Mikael – medicinal chemist Rich – global project manager   Back to: Hear from our scientists home

“Working with a highly professional and dedicated team on the first clinical trials with a novel compound that has the potential to revolutionize psychiatric therapy is the most rewarding and interesting aspect of my work.”

Rich is Global Project Manager for the Psychiatry Emerging Product team and manages AstraZeneca’s emerging portfolio of projects for anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He leads an international team of technical specialists in key aspects of the drug development process.

“One of AstraZeneca’s very important strengths is the international scientific cooperation, as well as the fact that we have the best of technology in almost every area you can imagine. This gives us a large advantage when we take on the task of identifying compounds.”

The Psychiatry Emerging Product team manages and develops the compounds that emerge from Discovery. “We enter the process early in pre-clinical phases to ensure that the planned output from Discovery – the identified candidate drug – exhibits the scientific properties and pharmacological profile that has the best probability of matching the target therapeutic profile of a compound. Our team serves as the "bridge” to ensure an efficient and effective transfer of responsibilities into Development functions once the candidate drug has been nominated from Discovery. ”

“My background is actually in Discovery. Before I took my current position about a year ago, I had been involved in Discovery research at AstraZeneca for 20 years. This makes it particularly interesting for me. While Discovery is the process of performing multiple cross disciplinary scientific studies with the ultimate goal of identifying a single compound, out of millions of possible compounds, in Development we take that single candidate drug that emerges from Discovery and bring it into the first clinical trials.”

Rich can trace his interest in drug discovery and development as far back as his undergraduate studies. “Throughout my undergraduate and graduate career I was very interested in how drugs act and how they are discovered. I took my undergraduate degree in pharmacy, then went to graduate school to study pharmacology, obtaining a PhD. Yet it was after this, when I held a postdoctoral position at the Mayo Clinic, that I was able to cultivate a greater understanding of how research impacts clinical medicine.”