A Dose of Hope

Kristen Eads supports patients who are prescribed medicines to treat rare diseases, ensuring that pharmaceutical science reaches people who can benefit. 

She’s uniquely qualified to serve as a rare patient experience strategy and design lead at UCB, a global biopharmaceutical company, thanks to the Master of Microbial Biology (MMB) degree she earned in 2006 from North Carolina State University.

The real benefit to the MMB program is the fact that it puts students squarely into industry to work on real problems and real challenges to create real solutions.

As a professional science master’s degree, the MMB program blends science and business education with practical training in the biotech industry. Eads took electives within the Poole College of Management, including a pharmaceutical supply chain course. She still remembers a guest speaker’s talk about the balance between the affordability of pharmaceuticals and innovation for new medications. 

“The real benefit to the MMB program is the fact that it puts students squarely into industry to work on real problems and real challenges to create real solutions,” she says.

Patients can have difficulty getting access to and coverage for rare disease medicines because they are specialty products, Eads says.

Patient support programs implemented by manufacturers help patients obtain, afford and remain compliant with their medications. Patients often don’t know these programs exist, so step one for Eads is building awareness.

Her MMB degree taught her to distill information and communicate to all stakeholders while working within a specialized business environment.

“Because it’s pharmaceuticals, it’s highly regulated for all the right reasons,” she says. “There’s a degree of scientific marketing associated with it, but I also work with lay people. I have to be able to interpret the data in a way that can be consumed by someone with a limited science background.”

Eads brought her industry perspective back to NC State, serving on the MMB’s Industry Advisory Board for 11 years before recently stepping away from the role.

“I have energy behind trying to help students make that transition into the working world and providing them perspective on how to go about doing it,” she says.

---