Skip to main content

Jenkins MBA Students’ Article Published in BioPharm International

“We chose to write this article because we wanted to both publicize the usefulness of the NC State Jenkins MBA program to scientific professionals in the biosciences area and to encourage those considering enrolling in the program,” said Vincent Turula, Ph.D., one of the authors.

Turula is an associate research fellow at Pfizer BioTherapeutics and Vaccines Outsourcing in Research Triangle Park (RTP), N.C. His classmate and co-author Navdeep Malkar, Ph.D., is a principal scientist at the startup company Seachaid Pharmaceuticals, Inc., also in the RTP area. Richard Kouri, Ph.D., professor of practice and director of the BioSciences Management Initiative in the NC State College of Management, is a third co-author of the article.

Turula and Malkar were in the NC State Jenkins MBA part-time program for working professionals. Malkar graduated in May 2009, and Turula in 2008.

As part of the Jenkins MBA program’s biosciences concentration, Turula, Malkar and fellow student team member Mac Rich completed a practicum experience with the Hamner Institute for Health Sciences in fall 2009. Their article, Building Partnerships between Academic and Biosciences Companies, summarized their project, which included developing a two-pronged approach to match Hamners’ research in the area of type 2 diabetes with potential partner companies.

“We believed that the approach to this practicum was unique and highly relevant these days given the increased emphasis on partnering and alliance forming between small biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies. In this article we sought to extol the leadership position of the NC State Jenkins Bioscience initiative,” Turula said.

“I thought the practicum was the one of the best parts of the Jenkins MBA’s biosciences curriculum,” Malkar said. “This project offered the opportunity to work on a genuine problem, with the involvement of people from industry, academia and a non-profit organization to build upon the partnership in the pharmaceutical industry.”

Companies in the biosciences industry “now have revenues of approximately $1.2 trillion per year and growth rates of 6 percent to 8 percent per year,” the authors state in their article. “This growth has fostered a need for managers that possess both scientific knowledge and business acumen.”

Traditional scientific and business programs provide academic backgrounds for the separate disciplines, but lack crossover for biosciences managers who need both, the authors state.

“Biosciences managers must understand the connections between and among all areas associated with the field,” they said, adding that companies in the three sectors of biotechnology – red, for healthcare; white, for industrial products, and green, for nutrition and agriculture – have all “voiced a desire for such bio-entrepreneurial managers. The BioSciences Management curriculum in the NC State Jenkins MBA program was designed to meet those needs.”

The academic program includes elements of traditional business concepts intertwined with scientific concepts. In addition to a core of courses in business fundamentals, the concentration adds biotechnology and pharmaceutical courses. The biosciences practicum experience culminations the curriculum with a short-term project that has students working directly with bio-agricultural, bio-industrial, medical devices, diagnostics, or pharmaceutical firms.

“The outcome is that students learn the tools needed to pursue management in biosciences and pharmaceutical environments in either science-based functions, such as research and development, or business functions. In return, the sponsor receives approaches and solutions to improve performance and positions themselves for enhanced competitive advantage,” the authors state.

“Being a scientist by training and having seen and experienced how business people make the wrong decisions about the right science, I wanted to make a real impact on how these decisions should be made, and decided to pursue the Jenkins MBA,” Malkar said.

“My MBA education has opened an entire new era of opportunities for me,” he said. “The MBA training as well as the practicum experience has (enabled) me to be an excellent strategic planner and decision maker, and to be cost-effective as well. These are most important for a small company to survive and to be successful in today’s world.” Malkar had joined his current company in the fall prior to his graduation.

The journal article includes a table showing a network of more than 30 of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies or organizations in North Carolina’s greater

Research Triangle Park region that engage with the Jenkins MBA program’s Biosciences Management initiative. All either have employees enrolled in the Jenkins MBA program, have sponsored practicum experiences, or are members of the BioSciences Management Initiative’s Industry Advisory Board.

Since the start of the Jenkins MBA’s BioSciences concentration in 2004, nearly 90 students working on project teams have completed 31 practica. The practicum experiences occasionally involve students in other Jenkins MBA concentrations such as a recent project that included students in both the biosciences concentration and the Jenkins MBA’s supply chain management concentration. This team worked with a large pharmaceutical company to define the worldwide capacity for the manufacturing of biologics and to determine whether to produce biologics externally, internally, or in combination.

“We are pleased that our innovative and growing biosciences program was featured in BioPharm International,” said Dr. Steve Allen, associate dean for graduate programs and research in the NC State College of Management. “The Jenkins MBA program is designed to create bio-entrepreneurial managers to meet the demands of diverse fields such as health care and agriculture. The report clearly articulates how we approach achieving those goals through a model that benefits both our students as well as the community.”

Dig Deeper