Anne

"We are successful at bringing meaningful, efficacious, and safe drugs to market and to the patients who need them most."

Anne relishes the opportunity to work with a variety of people on a broad range of projects. As Senior Director of the Toxicology Department at Allergan, she and her team are responsible for understanding side effects of the drugs the company develops. It starts with gaining an awareness of the side effects, then conducting additional studies to better understand these effects as a compound moves into clinical development.

Anne's career trajectory at Allergan is typical of many of the company's employees. In 1991, she joined the company as an entry-level toxicology scientist with a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in pharmacology and toxicology. Today she heads up a department of nine. She once left Allergan to pursue another opportunity only to return a few years later, something she thinks says a lot about the company and the opportunities it provides.

Perhaps the single thing that Anne enjoys most about her career at Allergan is the culture. She believes the company's specialty focus provides the perfect balance between big pharma resources and small biotech flexibility. On one hand, Allergan's operations are very nimble and flexible - not hampered by bureaucracy. But the organization also offers employees a critical mass of knowledge and experience that might not be available at a small biotech.

She also appreciates the collaborative approach fostered by the integrated teams in the R&D department, which enable toxicologists to work with pharmacokineticists, investigative and mechanistic toxicologists and analytical scientists. Unlike other pharmaceutical companies, this unique structure provides scientists with easy access to people with expertise in other disciplines. It provides added efficiency by enabling toxicologists to understand what the goals are for each drug in development, giving them the big picture perspective necessary to do a more thorough job. And it enables scientists to gain a wealth of experience with drugs that will eventually make it to the market.

Anne credits much of her success at Allergan to the company's dedication to rewarding motivated individuals. In her words: "There is consideration of career growth, and thoughtful consideration about what kind of training we need and what kind of experiences we should be gaining. We try to provide that for people within the organization."