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Editor’s note:
Young employees are the new force of the company that bring vitality. Young employees dare to face challenges that drive the development of the company. There are a group of young and passionate employees in Luye, 5 young employees’ representatives are invited to share their stories of with us.
Q: Welcome all to the staff interview. To start with, please give us a brief introduction of yourself.
Huang: My name is Huang Binghao, I joined the company in 2018, and I am currently working as an Academic Specialist in Conventional Drug Unit of Luye Pharma's Suzhou Office.
Wang: My name is Wang Ailei, I joined the company in July 2012, and I am currently working in Qingdao Luye SCO, responsible for the market development of the "Belt and Road" countries, and at the same time, I am also responsible for the import and export business of Life Sciences Group's International Trade Department.
Yang: My name is Yang Yifei, I joined the Group's R&D New Drug Discovery Research Department after my PhD graduation in 2020, and I am now mainly engaged in drug design and development in the direction of new molecular entities.
Yu: My name is Yu Jie, I joined the company as a fresh graduate in 2014, and I am currently working in Boan's Quality Management Department as a supervisor of the Bio-Detection and Inspection Laboratory, which is mainly responsible for bio-detection and inspection and the management of the general business.
Zheng: My name is Zheng Jibao, I graduated from Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, School of Acupuncture and Tuina in 2010 and have been working in TCM related field since graduation. I joined the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine at Yantai Huayi Rehabilitation Hospital in September 2019, and I am currently providing acupuncture treatment to patients in the inpatient department.
Q: Mr. Huang, please use three key words to summarize the job of an Academic Specialist, what have you gained and experienced in your work since you joined Luye?
Huang: If I had to summarize my five years in three words, I think they would be learning, opportunity and seize. The growth I have gained in this position over the past five years has been in stages. The first stage is when I joined the company after graduation. Although I was major in pharmacy, I was not familiar with the practical part of the job. With the support of the leaders, I continued to learn sales techniques and product knowledge, and gained a lot after two years. The second stage is in 2019-2020, due to policy change, the product that I was responsible for had been through a drastic drop in sales. I did not back down, and took this change as an opportunity. I kept finding solutions and received great support from the company. I was able to bring the sales back to normal level in the end. The third stage is about seizing. We cannot be too satisfied even when product sales have reached to a peak. Instead, we should keep looking for growth opportunity by constantly adjusting strategies, so that we can secure existing customers.
Q: Ms. Yu, you have taken various roles and responsibilities since you joined Luye in 2014. What you have gained and improved during these years? How do you see team collaboration in your work?
Yu: I was very fortunate to join Luye after graduation. When I joined the company, I found that the company has an open attitude to provide learning opportunities to all employees, as long as you have the willingness to learn new things and take more responsibilities.
When I first joined the company, I was involved in the construction of microbial identification system, at that time, very few companies in China carried out this work. In order to accomplish this work, under the support and guidance of the management team, I got a lot of opportunities to communicate with and learn from experts in the industry, and combined with my own professional knowledge as well as the study of domestic and foreign laws and regulations, and finally completed the construction of the system with the effective cooperation of all relevant departments. After that I joined Boan Biotech, and quickly completed the construction of microbial mapping and identification system. It provides the basis for microbiological control during the production process and also plays a key role in sterilization. I feel it's important to be consistently curious and internally driven at work, which pushes me to learn and grow in my work.
When it comes to teamwork, with the successful approval and launch of 2 Boan products in recent years, I have deeply felt the importance of teamwork. The competition for domestic biologics has been very fierce, which requires various departments to maintain close cooperation and communication and race against time. Boan will also see a number of products coming to the market in the future, and we will continue to cooperate with all efforts to help the products to be approved smoothly.
Q: Dr. Yang, if we compare the process of a drug from R&D to market as a dream journey, then the New Drug R&D Department you work in is the place where the dream starts, please talk about the challenges and joys of new drug R&D in your experience.
Yang: New drug discovery is the source of the entire drug development and its challenges are divided into two parts. To myself, after graduating in 2020, I joined the Group's R&D to work on drug design, and when I got into the real work, I realized that the knowledge I gained in school was far from enough. Because pharmacy integrates multidisciplinary knowledge, in addition to drug design, we also need to understand intellectual property rights, biological mechanisms, to consider the market value after approval, and a variety of other fields of knowledge. In this process, I realized that I still have much to learn, and although I encountered many challenges, I also gained a lot from it.
On the other hand, the entire pharmaceutical industry is facing challenges because the domestic pharmaceutical industry started later than developed markets, so we have to spend more energy and resources to develop more advantageous projects. Our projects need to be innovative and differentiated, which requires us to make comprehensive considerations and applications in terms of selecting targets, designing differentiated molecules, as well as utilizing the Group's advantageous formulation technologies to more effectively promote the establishment and development of projects.
We can also feel the joy of work in this process. The exploration and development of new drugs is just like the conception of life, giving it characteristics and advantages in the process of creating something from nothing. Recently, we completed the target design and compound screening synthesis of a new project, and finally initiated as a LY project, which is equivalent to the theoretical knowledge in textbooks used in practice and confirmed, that is the fun of new drug discovery.
Q: Mr. Wang, your work involves many cross-department collaborations. Can you share with us some stories about it?
Wang: Last year, my department worked with Luye Pharma APAC team and Luye Diagnostics’ team to complete a cross-BU collaboration. We were informed by the APAC team that a customer from the Philippines intends to buy some reagent kits. CellRun, the subsidiary company under Luye Diagnostics happened to have vendor to fulfill this demand. So we decided to work together, the Pharma team was responsible for communicating with Philippine customers, Diagnostics team was responsible for communicating with vendors, and my department was responsible for exporting supplies to overseas markets. Last year, due to the epidemic control in China, the country was very strict in checking the qualification of suppliers and materials for exporting to overseas, but we still managed to efficiently accomplish this task by connecting 6 internal and external companies within a very short period of time. The reason that we can pull this off is because we all share the clear target at the beginning, all departments kept transparent and open communication at all time.
Q: Dr. Zheng, why did you choose to become a TCM therapist? How do you understand the inheritance and innovation of Chinese medicine? And how do you integrate this concept into practice?
Zheng: My first contact with acupuncture was in the second grade of elementary school, when there was a doctor in our village who was good at acupuncture, once I went to get medicine when I saw him give the old man an acupuncture treatment, only once, the old man's back pain was relieved a lot, which left a deep impression on me. When I chose my major in the college entrance examination, I saw that Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine had a major in acupuncture and tuina, so I chose this major without any hesitation, and I have been working in this field since I graduated.
When it comes to the inheritance of Chinese medicine, I believe that Chinese medicine is an important part of traditional Chinese culture. At present, it seems that the inheritance of Chinese medicine should be more important than the development of Chinese medicine, and with the efforts of some Chinese medicine experts, our inheritance is still advancing. For example, the floating acupuncture, invented by the famous Chinese medicine expert Fu Zhonghua, is a needle therapy using disposable needles in the subcutaneous superficial fascia around local pain area, and is a product of the combination of traditional acupuncture and modern medicine. I enrolled in a floating acupuncture training in 2022 and have used it in clinical treatment. I remember a female patient in her 50s came to Huayi Rehabilitation Hospital because of her cervical spine problem, I used floating acupuncture to treat her, and after a few treatments her cervical spine problem was significantly improved, and she even slept much better than before. I am glad that I can do my best to bring better and faster treatment to more patients.
Dr. Zheng is conducting rehabilitation treatment to patient
Q: As representatives of young employees, what traits do you see in the young generation that can help the company to develop?
Yu: Most colleagues in my team are born in 1990s and 2000s. They don’t act like “Buddha-like” youngsters (a popular buzzword of the young generation on Chinese social media, which means keeping a casual and calm mindset toward career and life). They are hard-working, our department's work is actually very heavy, a lot of work are very urgent, but the young people in the team are not afraid of difficulties. When Boyounuo was approved in 2021, we needed to ship the products within 10 days of approval, and our department was responsible for the inspection and release of packaging materials, which was actually a time-consuming and cumbersome task. In order to complete this task in a timely manner, our team members came to the company before 6:00 a.m. so that they could receive materials and complete the inspection in a timely manner, and ultimately, with the cooperation of various departments, the package materials were inspected and released on the day of arrival to facilitate the shipment of Boyounuo within 10 days. These young people are also willing to accept new things and dare to innovate. We need to test bacterial endotoxin on the central control samples in the production process, and the sample volume is very large. In order to improve the work efficiency, team members conducted a series of research, and finally found a new rapid testing equipment from oversea market, after internal and external communication, we finally successfully introduced this equipment to our lab, and quickly completed the method development. This technology is currently in a leading position in Shandong Province, and we are the first to use it in Yantai. Members of the team have effectively improved their work efficiency through continuous methodological innovation, which has provided important support for the accelerated approval of coming projects.
Group photo of Yu Jie’s team
Yang: In fact, we can feel from the national policy in recent years that the country is encouraging more young people to devote themselves to scientific research projects, same for our New Drug Discovery Research Department. Every year we bring in fresh PhD students from major universities, and these young people, although they have less working experience, they are more creative in professional abilities and thinking patterns. Young people can come up with new ideas with differentiation, which is more conducive to the innovative nature of the project. In addition, I think that the young people are very energetic and motivated. Take our department as an example, we have different working groups and project groups in our daily work, and all of us are on-line 24-7, and we exchange the latest results of the studies provided by other departments as well as the international cutting-edge information related to the projects in the groups. This kind of real-time communication helps to grasp the internationalization progress of the projects in a full and timely manner, which is conducive to the layout of the project's later development strategies.
Group R & D conducting discussion on research projects
Huang: I think young people have both a thirst for results and a fear of the unknown, which is how I felt when I first started working on the front line. I think the way to overcome this fear is to be clear about what I want to do, set goals, and then utilize the resources and working methods that match them to achieve results.
Wang: The young people around me and I are very passionate in our work, and we all compete to get the job done. In these 11 years since I joined Luye, I have deeply felt the difference between the workplace and school life, and every time I finish a job, I realize that I have gained a lot. Therefore, I will also use this to encourage the young people in the department to keep improving, because their potential is really unlimited.
Group photo of Wang Ailei’s team at the exhibition
Zheng: I have been working in TCM for the whole time, and I noticed that young people in my field are more introvert, and this introverted character allows us to concentrate on in-depth research and learning. Sun Simiao, one of the most important medical scientists in ancient China said: ‘After studying TCM for 3 years, one says there are no diseases cannot be cured; after practicing medicine for 3 years, one says there are no diseases can be cured’. This is exactly how we felt when we first started to work in this area. This requires us to recognize our own shortcomings and to keep learning and improving our own abilities. Huayi Rehabilitation often invites well-known external experts to give us lectures, which effectively enhances our professional knowledge and skills, thus enabling us to better benefit our patients, alleviate their pains, and help rehabilitated patients return to normal life as soon as possible.
Q: Last but not least, please share your expectations for the future.
Wang: My current responsibility is more on the sales side. Qingdao Luye SCO has been established for two years, during this period of time our performance has been doubled. For the future, I hope we can achieve 100 million in sales with the leadership of the management team and the support of all factories.
Yang: I hope we can initiate more LY projects in the coming year and to deliver a good result for Luye’s 30th anniversary.
Huang: I will not be satisfied with what I have achieved right now. Instead, I will work harder to grasp more opportunities to achieve better business growth.
Yu: All of our team members have devoted tremendous efforts to each product from R & D to approval. I hope to see more products to be approved and launched in the future. I also hope that the Group, through its diversified and internationalized development strategy, will go further on the path of internationalization and realize our vision of becoming a leading global pharmaceutical company.
Zheng: Since I joined Huayi Rehabilitation, the number of rehabilitation patients has increased exponentially. This is due the support of the society and government. People have paid more attention to the communication and education of rehabilitation. In the future, I hope that Huayi Rehabilitation can realize further growth with the development of the rehabilitation industry, and win a place in the field of rehabilitation in Shandong and even in China, and I also hope that I can use my own knowledge and skills to benefit more patients!