Academic-drug industry fellowships

The UNC/BW fellowship, like other industry/academia collaborative fellowships, provides a unique training experience in clinical research. Both academia and the pharmaceutical industry have opened their doors and allowed clinical pharmacists to spend a year or more developing clinical research skills and an understanding of the drug development process. Is it worth it? Is this program a benefit to the individuals, to the sponsors, or to the profession of pharmacy? The survey of these fellows provides us with the individual's perspective on the benefit and quality of the fellowship. Most believed the fellowship provided them with training to meet their needs and interests. However, given this small number of individual opinions and comments, how do we determine whether the fellowship is meeting the original goal to train clinical pharmacists to be clinical researchers? By looking at the career paths of those who have completed the program, we may gain insight into whether the fellows are involved with research. Since the fellowship has been in existence for only six years, we really can look only at the initial placement of these clinical pharmacists. A majority have gained employment with clinical research responsibilities within the pharmaceutical industry. One measure of the research capabilities of these fellows is their contributions to the scientific literature; 10 papers and 3 abstracts have been generated by fellows since they completed their fellowships (Appendix I). As expected, the research contributions of the two-year fellows are greater than that of the one-year fellows. Seven one-year fellows did not have a publication.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)