Medical Science Liaison

As an MSL, you will be focused on education rather than sales. Your main aims will be to: educate key clinicians about specific drugs or medical devices answer their scientific questions about these products feed key information back to colleagues in commercial functions, such as marketing and sales, to inform their strategies. You'll need to provide clinicians with accurate and balanced information about a specific drug and relevant data from drug trials, so that they can make decisions on how to use that drug. It's likely you'll be assigned a specific geographical area to cover, and will specialise in a particular drug, medical device or therapeutic area. Job titles can vary depending on the company and the role may also be known as medical affairs, medical scientific adviser, medical manager or regional scientific manager. As an MSL, you'll need to: identify leading influential experts in fields of medicine or research relevant to your product, e.g. senior physicians and professors. These experts are referred to in the industry as key opinion leaders (KOLs)build peer-to-peer relationships with KOLs provide medical and scientific information to respond to KOLs' technical questions about your drug or medical device lead meetings with KOLs to discuss relevant scientific literature and address their enquiries make educational presentations to senior doctors and researchers, for example on clinical trial data respond to scientific enquiries from distributors and internal colleagues gather information from KOLs as to how they are using your drug feed information back to marketing and sales colleagues to help develop marketing materials and commercial strategy develop and deliver scientific training courses to other staff members and international distributors provide information to clinicians with an interest in studying your drug in a different context, or with a different patient group from the one it was initially intended coordinate trials to test the drug in different contexts keep up to date with the latest scientific research and clinical data relevant to your focus drug or device.