I am a 1997 graduate from Michigan State University's Clinical Laboratory Science program. My career path has taken me places I never anticipated as I worked my way through the CLS program, participated in an internship at St. Lawrence Hospital in Lansing, became ASCP and NCA certified and (finally) started working full time as a Medical Technologist. I finally had the job I had worked years to become qualified for; little did I know how short my time as a hospital Medical Technologist would be.
I got a call from Dr. Thorne encouraging me to apply for an open position at what was then Parke-Davis in Ann Arbor. I had no idea what Parke-Davis was, or why they might need a Med Tech, but I was intrigued, so I made what has come to be the phone call that changed my professional life.
I have been working for what is now Pfizer Inc for just over three years. I work in the Clinical Pathology group of Drug Safety Evaluation. In some respects, my daily work is very similar to a Med Tech's work at a hospital. I am part of a lab that analyzes blood, urine and bone marrow on automated systems identical to those used in hospital laboratories. The difference is that instead of providing physicians with data to aid in diagnosis and treatment, we provide researchers with data to detect experimental drug toxicity and identify the organ system(s) where a drug might exhibit toxic effects.
Sometimes, there is evidence that a drug might prove toxic to a specific tissue or system that does not have a marker as simple as an alkaline phosphatase or hemoglobin. It is then up to my group to develop assays to detect that drug's affect and correlate a change in assay parameter to a change in drug concentration. A lot of research, critical thinking, troubleshooting and validating goes into developing an assay. The skills I honed as I worked through lectures, and recitations (and who could forget the labs!) throughout the CLS program have been put to the test and continue to develop as I face new challenges working in Pharmaceutical Research.