VP Global Clinical Supply Chain

What is your role and what are your responsibilities?

Oh, hello, I'm Luisa Freitas Dos Santos and I lead the global clinical supply chain at GSK. So what that means in that role is that I lead the team that is responsible for the manufacture and the management of clinical supplies that feed into all our ongoing clinical trials and that covers all the therapeutic areas and also the from the early Phase Is right through to submission. And just to give an idea of the scale, so that means really supporting hundreds of clinical studies in that are taking place at any moment in time in about 60 countries around the world with 1000s of patients enrolled.

What qualifications and experience do you have?

Well I'm a chemical engineer by training so I did my first degree in Portugal and then after a brief work experience in the Netherlands I came to the UK to do my PhD in Chemical Engineering again at Imperial College in London. And the topic was the design and modelling of bio reactors to treat very toxic volatile organic compounds. And I was it was really interested in the topic and in the environmental sustainability.

And I decided to stay on as a postdoc, and to pursue the translation of that idea into a practical application and to really deploy it in the in the real world. And I was very lucky to be one of the cofounders of a start-up company based on that research that really took that idea and scaled it and I think that relates to something that was a passion that initiated and stayed with me until today. Which is the translation of a research idea into practical application make it work and if you think about even the medicines that we work on an idea in the lab starts very small, starts with a molecule and then can end up as a as a medicine that millions of patients take. So that is still the idea from that initial experience, that is still a passion of mine today.

When and why did you decide to join the pharmaceutical industry?

So I did not start at the outset thinking that I'm going to the pharmaceutical industry. I was very interested in environmental engineering and sustainability perhaps at the time that it wasn't as popular and talked about as it is today. But I was very keen on pursuing the design of bioreactors that could really be used using natural cells to treat some very toxic compounds. And at the same time that I was doing my PhD and postdoc, the group and the colleagues I worked with actually were using similar bio reactors to produce some of the components to make new treatments, new medicines. I got really fascinated by looking at how we could then use engineering chemical engineering to not only to deal with the environmental impact, but actually to use this bio reactors treatment medicine. And so when a job came up advertised a GSK, in R&D. I did apply not knowing anything about the pharma industry, not knowing that I was going to stay for such a long time and this was almost 35 years ago. But the concept of actually having an idea in the lab and then innovate and translate it into something that millions of patients can take. It was fascinating, then, and still is today.