New clerkship bonds medical education and industry

“Clerkship in Biotechnology” offers fourth-year medical students the chance to receive credit for working up to six weeks in one of four firms in the Boston area that specialize in biotechnology or in designing and building medical devices.

by Scott J. Turner

A new elective in the Medical School links business and medical education like never before.

“Clerkship in Biotechnology” offers fourth-year medical students the chance to receive credit for working up to six weeks in one of four firms in the Boston area that specialize in biotechnology or in designing and building medical devices.

In medical education, an elective biotechnology rotation on par with more traditional elective clerkships may be “unique,” said Brownell Anderson, senior vice president for medical education, Association of American Medical Colleges.

“This clerkship is one of the very few of its kind this well structured among the nation’s medical schools, and an important opportunity to give students for learning about a very critical component of our health care system,” she said.

“The new clerkship fills a niche for today’s medical students,” said Stephen R. Smith, M.D., associate dean for medical education.

The program addresses an ever-increasing impact of biotechnology in the practice of medicine, said its creator, fourth-year medical student Barrett Bready.

“It bridges a gap between clinical medicine, where you apply therapies, and industry, where you create and shape those therapies,” he said. Bready conceived of the elective two years ago after reading about the growing number of young doctors pursuing careers in other fields. “Each company in the program will offer different learning opportunities,” he said.

Those firms include AnVil, Inc., which commercializes knowledge extracted from healthcare data; Biogen, Inc., discoverer and developer of drugs through genetic engineering; Boston Scientific, designer and builder of “less invasive” medical devices such as catheters; and CombinatoRx, Inc., a privately held pharmaceutical company focused on creating breakthrough medicines using a proprietary combination drug approach.

A top-level executive at each firm received an adjunct faculty appointment. Each executive will mentor one student. In recent years, relationships between pharmaceutical firms and many physicians have grown antagonistic.

Besides strengthening ties between Medical School and industry, the clerkship will provide “free access to intellectual capital in the form of highly motivated fourth-year medical students at Brown,” Bready said.

“This clerkship represents a much more formal opportunity than in the past to learn how biotech companies work and to transfer biotech results into clinical practice,” said Donald J. Marsh, dean of medicine and biological sciences. Marsh worked with Bready to develop, design and drive the elective through the approval process.