Pharmacist’s Opportunities and Challenges

I want to talk about the pharmacist role and opportunities in biotechnology or in biologics. Pharmacist typically serve as a consultant to the physician. Now for biologics, in particular, it’s a genetic screening because biologics don’t has its work for all patients. Patient must express certain kind of genotyping in order to be responsive to biologics therapy. So we pharmacists can play an important role in this regard to help the physicians with some genetic screening. We also serve as an adviser to the patient. For example, self-injection or office visit, we can give the patient advice. If they decide to use self-injection, then how to manage the prefilled syringe? And how to rotate the subcutaneous injection site?

Those are the advice that we can give to the patient. And perhaps someday in the future, we will be dispensing biosimilars in the community pharmacy and in hospital pharmacy will be asked to evaluate and recommend biosimilar product. Now for those opportunities, we need to accept the challenges. First, we must update the dispenses skill. For example, the reconstitution technique. Remember the good old shake well before use? Now that no longer applies to biologics because by shaking up the solutions, you actually deactivate the protein or denature the protein. We also need to update therapeutic knowledge with regarded advocacy, with regarded side effect, and of course, the genetic genotypes that effect their advocacy and side effect.

And as mentioned earlier, someday we may be dispensing biologics at the community pharmacy. And that I want to use this slide to illustrate the teamwork. Together, everybody accompany more. The therapeutic team is a common practice now. As a team that take care of the patient. And we pharmacists are always a member of the team and we must be able to fulfill that role and play a significant role on that team. And for that I conclude this lecture. I’m going to encourage you to get involved in the team work. Make ourself seen and known recognized in the healthcare team. Thank you very much.