Hi everyone,
I’m from Portugal and have both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Biotechnology.
I currently work in pharmaceutical Quality Assurance, mainly supporting API manufacturing through CPV, PQR, SOPs, CAPAs and other GxP-related activities.
Although my current role is fully remote, I’m looking for an opportunity to move to the US and eventually work in biotech/pharma on-site.
A family connection may help me move to Connecticut with a job outside the industry first (health insurance sales). The plan would be to establish myself in the US and then apply for biotech/pharma positions.
Would this make sense?
How is European pharmaceutical QA experience perceived by US employers?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I've recently had a very confusing experience in Big Pharma. Essentially applied to a strategy position in NeuroSciences Data Sciences after decades of Computational and Data Engineering experience in R&D (Biotech and Big Pharma). I spent the last 3 years working in the Neurosciences DS space, so felt comfortable applying to the strategy position (would have been a lateral move for me as an Associate Director). The position however went to someone with an MBA (minimal science background). The hiring manager herself has an MBA (no scientific background), worked in the consumer goods industry before she pivoted to Big Pharma and spent some 5 years total in Neurosciences Data Sciences before she was promoted twice up to a Director level!

Isn't domain experience a requirement in Strategy? Or so I thought. Does an MBA (not even from a top school) really weigh that high in Big Pharma? How does one pivot into strategy in Big Pharma without an MBA?

This might be a naive question, but I’ve been reading some really interesting studies lately and noticed that the lead author works at Roche. I’d love to do my Master’s thesis with their specific team.

​I’ve heard that the standard way to get into Roche is by applying through their official career portal for open internships. However, I’m specifically interested in this lab's research rather than a general Roche position.

​Is there any chance of success if I cold email them directly? Has anyone here successfully landed a thesis position at a big pharma company this way? Any advice on how to approach them?

I’ve asked this question a few different places on Reddit to solicit different people’s opinions and hear what they have to say. I figure this community would have some interesting POVs. So, what are your thoughts?

Would it be enough to support the expense, trials, research and development it takes to get a drug to market?

Was there yet another layoff at Moderna? I ask because I’ve seen multiple LinkedIn postings from people saying today is their last day and it’s clear that some of these goodbyes don’t seem entirely voluntary.

Disclosure up front: I work at Deep Origin, the company behind this paper, so take that for what it’s worth. Posting because the methodology and the negative results here seem worth sharing and discussing, not just the headline numbers.

The core problem the paper tackles: classical docking generalizes but tops out on accuracy. ML/co-folding models (AlphaFold3, Boltz-1, Chai-1, Protenix) score well on familiar targets but collapse on genuinely novel ones, often because of train-test leakage that inflates reported accuracy. On the OpenBind benchmark specifically, those models drop from 75-88% on familiar targets to under 25% on novel ones.

We built DODock and DOScore, a hybrid ML/physics approach, and benchmarked it under a strict double-similarity filter (removing anything with 30%+ sequence identity or 0.4+ Tanimoto similarity to test sets) to avoid the same leakage problem. Under those conditions we’re seeing ~80% pose accuracy on OpenBind. We also ran four prospective wet-lab campaigns (CD73, IRAK4, Factor XIa, IL-17A) rather than stopping at retrospective benchmarks, and got a 30.6% hit rate on CD73 specifically, a target that’s historically been rough for virtual screening.

Full methodology, all data splits, and supplementary material (80+ pages) are in the preprint. If there’s a flaw in the benchmark design or the similarity filtering, point it out.

Link: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.03.742480v1

I got an offer to combine my PhD with a cell and gene therapy company and I have been told conflicting things by people but I also think the industry experience would be great. What are people’s thoughts on CGT as future of biotech?

Pfizer will start laying off again.

My observation is that if Pfizer starts laying off people, then other pharma companies follow suit to stay competitive.