Why Pharma Needs More Physicians And How To Get There
By Emmanuelle Clerisme-Beaty, M.D.
I spent the early part of my career in academic medicine, and I loved the work. I was on the faculty at a premier institution, taking care of patients, conducting research, and contributing to a field I cared deeply about. Although I was building the kind of career I had always imagined, somewhere along the way I began to feel the limits of that setting in a way I had not anticipated. I began to wonder whether this was the right setting for me to have the kind of impact I aspired to while remaining true to what mattered most to me.
For all its intellectual richness, I found being in an academic setting, at times isolating with career advancement being tied closely to my individual output, such as number of first or last author publications or NIH grants. However, what I enjoyed most about academic medicine was the opportunity to collaborate with diverse teams around a shared purpose. Whether working alongside multidisciplinary clinical teams to provide the best care for patients, partnering with researchers to answer important scientific questions, or teaching and mentoring residents, fellows, and trainees, I was always energized by the exchange of ideas and collective problem-solving. That is what eventually led me to decide to pursue a career in pharma.
I think there is a misconception that prevents physicians from seriously considering this career path: going into pharma does not mean leaving patients behind. I believe pharma offers the opportunity to work across functions, apply scientific rigor at scale, and contribute to advancing patient care through evidence generation, innovation, and education, ultimately impacting far more patients than I could reach individually in clinical practice. What changed is not my connection to patients, but how I contribute to their care. Not as an individual, but by leading and being part of cross-functional teams that bring different perspectives and expertise together around a shared purpose. That change has opened a scale of impact that my academic role, for all its value, had not offered.
What Is Happening To Physicians Right Now
I share this, because I think it is relevant to what is happening in medicine more broadly right now. The pressures on physicians have been building for over a decade and they are not easing. Burnout is rising across specialties. The demands of training have been addressed to some degree through regulation, but clinical practice itself has grown heavier in ways that regulation has not fully reached: documentation requirements, reimbursement complexity, less time with patients, and a growing distance between why most physicians went into medicine and what the job asks of them on a daily basis.
As a result, practicing physicians are feeling the weight of all of this and may be looking for a way to continue contributing to patient care in a form that is more sustainable for them. At the same time, physicians in training may not yet be aware of these shifts, nor have they been shown the range of career paths that are accessible to them with a medical degree. Both groups, I think, have limited information and exposure to the opportunities that exist in pharma and could benefit from a clearer understanding of how their medical training and experience can translate into a meaningful career in the life sciences industry.
The Exposure Gap
One of the challenges, as I see it, is that medical training primarily prepares physicians for clinical care and does not do much beyond that. Often, students are not systematically exposed to the range of careers that are available to them once they have their degree. Indeed, most programs do not prepare their graduates to navigate a career search outside of clinical academic medicine. Trainees often lack exposure to what contributing to patient outcomes through drug development, health systems work, digital health, or any number of other fields looks like in practice.
I was fortunate to have been exposed to pharma through a series of summer internship programs from my freshman year of college through medical school with Merck. That exposure gave me a window into a world that most of my colleagues never had the chance to see, and it shaped the career I was eventually able to build. Without it, I would not have known where to look. That is the gap I keep coming back to, that the path exists, but that most physicians do not know where to find it.
What The Transition Involves
For physicians who are thinking about this kind of move, I want to be transparent about what it involves, because I think the conversations that happen around this tend to go to one extreme or the other, either making it sound more difficult than it is or glossing over the real adjustments it requires.
What does change is the nature of your contribution. You move away from the direct patient relationship and into work that operates further upstream: shaping the options that exist, contributing to the evidence that informs clinical decisions, helping develop medicines that will reach patients you will never personally meet. That is a real shift, and I think it deserves honest reflection before someone makes the move.
What does not have to change as much as people often assume is your connection to clinical work. Many physicians in pharma maintain some level of practice, and I think that is worth knowing for anyone who is weighing this. The boundary is more permeable than it looks from the outside.
Personally, what I found on the other side was a different kind of meaning. When a medicine reaches patients, that outcome belongs to everyone who contributed to making it possible. And yes, it truly does take a village. Knowing that my work has helped give patients access to life-saving treatments, or provided them with more treatment options, has been one of the most rewarding parts of my career. That sense of shared accomplishment and the opportunity to contribute to patient care on a broader scale have made the trade-offs that came with the transition worthwhile.
What I Think Could Help
I do not think the burden of finding this path should fall entirely on individual physicians who happen to encounter it by chance the way I did. Medical education and training programs could do more to expose students to the range of careers available to them. That seems like a reasonable update to how we prepare physicians for the full scope of what their degree makes possible.
Alternately, the pharma industry could also be more intentional about providing opportunities, through internships, fellowships, and partnerships that create the kind of direct exposure that helps physicians and trainees understand what the work involves in practice. I knew what I was walking into because I had been inside it. Most physicians do not have that, and I think we could do more to change that.
For any physician standing at that same crossroads, my advice is simple: don't focus on whether you're leaving medicine. Focus on how you want to continue contributing to patient care. Your medical training opens doors to many different paths, and pharma is one of them.
About The Author:
Emmanuelle Clerisme-Beaty, M.D., is Senior Vice President of Medicine and Regulatory, U.S., at Boehringer Ingelheim.