Learner Profile
Ritwik Ritwik

HMX Courses

Immunology, Genetics

Ritwik Ritwik came into the pharmaceutical world after training as an engineer, and he knew he needed some help to understand the medical aspects of his team’s work developing new ways to administer vaccines. His desire to learn more led him to HMX courses, and he found the knowledge he gained gave him the ability to participate in professional conversations in a new way.

Currently I am a product development manager for a vaccine product developing company…What brought me to this course was my lack of knowledge of anything pertaining to either vaccines or the immunogenic aspects of it, because I’m originally from a mechanical engineering background. I did my PhD in chemical engineering and went to work for a pharmaceutical consultancy…I’ve sort of stumbled into the pharmaceutical world of understanding product development and understanding it from that perspective.

As a novice effectively in the vaccine space, it was quite important for me to understand the medical aspect as well. There are people who report into me whose work I coordinate; I look at the big picture, sort of the entire product point of view, but it is quite key to have technical discussions with lead experts in different aspects. When it came down to different immunogenic discussions, I was quite often the silent person in the room. I really felt that for me to actually be the manager and manage their work, I should know more about their work than themselves. So it was a good opportunity to enhance my knowledge.

I almost did become a medical student. This was way back, a couple of decades back…I had a fairly in-depth [understanding], almost like a first-year medical student level at one point. It’s true I have forgotten quite a lot of it because I’m not using it, but reading a lot of different terminologies, they come back to you after a while. If I was to summarize, 80% was brand-new to me – I never heard the word, I never interacted with it – but 20% was, ‘oh yeah, I remember that.’

Certain lessons were difficult, like genetics at the beginning was difficult to get into, but once you go through a few lessons, you understand a lot more. The same with immunology, but the disadvantage of immunology is there are a lot of different pockets, and you have to understand the pockets before you can connect the dots into the big picture. Whereas with genetics it was more of a slow effect where one dot was linked to the other, and quite often once you caught on the flow, it was easier to progress through the different lessons. So there were certain lessons which were difficult; most of them were adequately challenging. They’re not something which I couldn’t understand.

I would say there were certain lessons where the clinical focus was very relevant. There were certain bits where you understand the different mechanisms, and it would help you start to understand your own product. Especially around RNA and DNA applications in vaccines, that was very crucial for me.

Then there’s interaction with someone who’s a medical student at Harvard [in the discussion forums]. That’s something you don’t usually have, a direct connection, a chat that might inspire someone to come up with something else. Giving an example: I’m a product manager thinking about how can I maximize the information from Genetics, thinking about how I should run my vaccination program, so that’s something which I mentioned in one of the discussion forums, and it had lots of comments on it…that’s something which is directly relevant to how I shall plan my future commercial aspect.

It’s a really nice course for anyone who is interested in the basic levels…it’s quite detailed for what it is aimed for. It goes from a very grassroots level to actually a very sufficient working knowledge. You can’t suddenly start writing a paper on it, but it’s more like first year or first semester at Harvard [Medical School]… for that reason, I would say it’s a really excellently tailored course.

Absolutely, even now in many ways when we have discussions with partners, labs that develop the vaccines, you can actually sit around the table and see the mechanism, and that previously was difficult…as you can imagine I’m not from the medical science field, but now I can at least have a very basic level of discussion with them. It’s the same as my Japanese, effectively; you can have a conversation with someone, but you can’t go into the very deep technical – you can have a basic technical discussion, which is good enough. You don’t need to go into that much detail, because you’re not doing their job, you just need to understand how their work is translating into yours, which is a slightly different focus. So for me, that was the right level.