In the October 2024 edition of DIA’s Global Forum magazine, Global Forum founding Editor-in-Chief and former DIA board member Andrzej Czarnecki of Eli Lilly and Company shares his reflections on DIA’s 60-year anniversary and prospects for the future with his successor, current Editor-in-Chief Alberto Grignolo.
Alberto Grignolo (DIA): Andrzej, welcome. Please introduce yourself, the work that you have done, and the work that you do now.
Andrzej Czarnecki (AC): I am a medical doctor. I finished university studies with a specialization in internal medicine and cardiology, and subsequently in clinical pharmacology. Over the years, I worked in clinical medicine in different hospitals and environments but predominantly university hospitals and post-graduate medical schools in Poland and in the UK. In the UK, it was the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, located at the Hammersmith Hospital, now part of the University College in London. I also worked in experimental pharmacology and later in experimental physiology at the University of Cambridge.
Because of my work in experimental physiology and pharmacology and years in clinical medicine, I started shifting toward clinical pharmacology, maybe because I wanted to use all the knowledge pulled together instead of using it in separate silos. Later, I got involved in drug safety and drug clinical trials.
DIA: How did you make the transition from clinical medicine to clinical trials and clinical pharmacology in industry?
AC: This wasn’t really a transition. I started being a junior investigator early in my clinical work and then a more advanced investigator during my time in Poland. When I started working at Hammersmith Hospital, I worked with Professor Sir Colin Dollery, whom some people may remember as one of the most prominent clinical pharmacologists in Europe in those days. He had a unit for phase 1 and phase 2 trials, so progressing to later-stage clinical trials was natural for me; basically, I was “transitioning on the job.”
DIA: Sir Colin certainly was a luminary. I did cardiovascular research in graduate school and saw that name in many publications; he was legendary. You were fortunate.
AC: Yes, I knew him quite well. Later in my professional life, I used to chair some of the sessions in which he was a speaker, and he used to chair some of the sessions I was presenting, so we had a continuum of earlier connection. Unfortunately, he passed away about four years ago. But he, together with Folke Sjokvist from Karolinska Institutet, were the two most prominent people in clinical pharmacology in Europe in the 1980s and ’90s, and maybe late ’70s as well.
To read the full interview, visit the DIA Global Forum website.
