Learner Profile
Alessandra Lafranconi
Employer
Boehringer Ingelheim
HMX Course
After making a career move from medical doctor to being a global medical advisor at one of the world’s leading research-driven pharmaceutical companies, Alessandra Lafranconi felt she needed a review on the basics of pharmacology to better support her work. Her search led her to the HMX Fundamentals Pharmacology course. Alessandra shares how the course helped her solidify her understanding of pharmacology and build confidence in her career.
What led you to your current role and why did you decide to take the pharmacology course?
I joined the pharmaceutical industry in 2018 out of desperation, because the public system was not working at the speed I wanted it to work. In 2021, I moved from a country medical role to a corporate medical role. Along with my physical move to a different country, I also moved earlier in the lifetime of my compounds (from licensed drugs to pipeline). My knowledge on drug discovery and development was based on my pharmacology classes, which I took in 2007. I still remembered the basics of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, but I realized that a refresh would have helped a lot, especially in boosting my confidence, in a time in which I felt quite vulnerable because of the many changes happening in my life. That’s why, when the opportunity came across to take the HMX course, I decided to enroll into one of the fundamentals.
What topics did you find most interesting or useful in the course?
The dose-response curves have always fascinated me, because they enable the understanding of what is happening inside the human body. In the course, there is a special feature in which you can play with different parameters (potency, maximal effect, slope, for example) and observe real-time how these parameters impact on the expected response: this was simply brilliant, and I found it much more efficacious than lengthy explanations!
Were there any tools during the course that you found useful?
The questions after each of the sessions were very valuable, because it was like a reality check. It made me think: Did I learn? — Or should I reread this? Also, the feature of either going full speed, normal speed, or slower speed was very useful. At certain parts I was feeling confident and I could go at a faster speed, for others I replayed the concept a couple of times. I was the owner of my own learning.
Have you had a chance to apply what you’ve learned in your work?
One feature that I really enjoyed in this course was when the instructor would explain by drawing on the whiteboard with a voiceover. A few days after the HMX course, I was talking with a colleague about preparing some animated visuals for the mechanism of action of one of our pipeline molecules. My colleague, who also attended a similar HMX course, suggested using the whiteboard with voiceover feature, which we both appreciated during the course. Three months have passed from that day, and we now have a beautiful 3-minute animation on whiteboard with a voiceover, in which we could apply not only the scientific concepts but also the animation features learned through the course.
Anything else you would like to share about your experience with the course?
One final thought is that I’ve found it to be typical of professionals (often females) to sometimes experience the so-called “impostor syndrome”. I have experienced it myself, and I am learning on how to fight it. For example, I now know that I feel more comfortable in approaching experienced colleagues if I do my homework first. In the first months in my new role, being new to clinical development, I felt shy in approaching my super-experienced colleagues from research. This HMX course happened at the right time, and gave me the confidence to go and take the conversation in a proactive way.
Would you say HMX courses were worth your time?
Yes, I would totally recommend it. You will learn a lot and you can personalize your learning and decide the speed at which you play the content. One evening, you can study for 20 minutes and the next evening you can study for three hours– It’s truly at your own pace. Additionally, you have questions coming through that are constantly testing if you’re progressing or not, so, you really don’t feel like you’re bombarded by a lot of information. It’s rather that you are helped through a vast amount of information and you’re navigating with somebody that is really guiding you. Lastly, you will be exposed to very modern and pleasant features, and to patients’ stories too, which are powerful in humanizing the TOP content provided by the course itself.