Get Science Podcast

We’ve reached the final installment of this special miniseries of the Get Science Podcast, featuring the exciting work of Pfizer’s postdocs. We recently attended Pfizer’s Annual Postdoc Symposium at our La Jolla, California research site, where we had a chance to interview a handful of next-generation scientific leaders.

Continuing our podcast miniseries from Pfizer’s Annual Postdoc Research Symposium, held this year at our La Jolla research site, we sit down with the next generation of scientific leaders to learn more about what drives their passion to advance research. In this episode, we’ll hear from a few postdocs and their mentors about navigating the transition from academia to industry, the importance of mentors to help prioritize research goals, and their scientific inspirations.

This week, we're speaking with Sydney Lavoie, a postdoc in the Inflammation and Immunology research unit based in Pfizer’s Cambridge, Massachusetts research site, who’s interested in the gut microbiome. Later in this episode, we’ll meet Sharon Campbell and her mentor, Orla Cunningham, who are based in the biomedicine design research group at Pfizer’s Dublin, Ireland research site. They’ll tell us an interesting story of how Sharon came to Pfizer with no experience in next-generation sequencing skills, but quickly got up-to-speed to make a big impact in her current research project.

Continuing on our theme of “rule-breaking” biology, Thomas Wynn shares his own insights on the the exciting and sometimes frustrating aspects of pursuing hypotheses that “don’t pan out” as you expect them to. And, given his knack for making the immune system understandable for non-scientists, we think you’ll especially enjoy tuning in to this episode.

In our latest episode of the Get Science Podcast, Seng Cheng, Chief Scientific Officer of the Rare Disease Research Unit at Pfizer, discusses his urgent mission to help find breakthrough treatments for rare genetic conditions, such a hemophilia, sickle cell anemia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. “There are many thousands of rare diseases,” says Cheng, who is based at Pfizer’s Kendall Square, Cambridge, Mass. research site. “For me, the challenge is to make sure we can develop medicines for as many different conditions as we can bring to bear, so we can provide not just hope, but true relief for these individuals.”

Continuing our series on “rule-breaking” science, we have a conversation with Mike White, Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer in the Tumor Cell Biology Group at Pfizer’s La Jolla Research site. For nearly two decades, White was based at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as an expert in cancer cell signaling. But in 2016, he joined Pfizer, making the leap from academia into industry. For White, the transition has been an opportunity to “go out onto into the wild frontier and be aggressive in finding new medicines for patients.”

Listen to our latest episode to learn more about White’s passion for diving into the complexity of biology to uncover new pathways to fight cancer.

When babies are born, they are at their most vulnerable, as their immune systems are still developing and they are too young to be vaccinated. But thanks to the protection from antibodies they receive in the womb, through a process called maternal immunization, many babies arrive into the world with a special set of protections already circulating inside of them

In the latest series of the Get Science podcast, we’re talking to Pfizer researchers about how pursuing rule-breaking science can lead to new discoveries. Our next guest, Mike Vincent, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Inflammation and Immunology Research Unit offers a new twist on our theme.

Since grade school, we’ve been taught that the laws of science are hard and fast. But as technology enables scientists to delve deeper and collaborate better, they’re increasingly encountering surprising pockets of science that defy these “rules.”

Charlotte Allerton has dedicated her career to helping optimally design medicines that transform patients’ lives.