Hot Jobs: Bioscience and Drug Discovery with “Organs on a Bench”

The medications we use today, to treat everything from coughs to cancer, were developed through a series of steps to figure out how safe and effective they are. It’s a long process, from lab tests to human subjects, before the drug can be made widely available.

HemoShear, a biotech research company in Charlottesville, Virginia has found a way to make that process faster and safer, using “organs on a bench.” “What that means is that we have developed a device that is able to mimic the real human organ,” says Banu Cole. She’s a molecular biologist, and the scientific director at HemoShear. By testing diseased cells in these devices, researchers are able to see how a human organ might respond to the same conditions. Over time, this produces a lot of information to keep track of. That’s where Steve Hoang comes in. He’s a computational biologist. “Out of our system we generate large amounts of data, and to interpret that data we have to be able to visualize it,” he says. “So I come up with methods for visualizing and interpreting that data, and making sense of it.” Jobs in drug discovery and bioscience use math, biology and computer science to improve the lives of very sick people in a faster, safer way. If you do well in these subjects, this might be the field for you!

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