Department of Pharmacy, Waterloo Campus, King's College London, 150 Stamford Street SE1, 9NH, London, UK
Andries Koster
European Association of Faculties of Pharmacy (EAFP), Department Pharmaceutical Sciences, Utrecht University, PO Box 80082, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands
Luigi Martini
Department of Pharmacy, Waterloo Campus, King's College London, 150 Stamford Street SE1, 9NH, London, UK
Vivien Moffat
European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), Rue du Trône, 108, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Jane Nicholson
European Industrial Pharmacists' Group (EIPG), 4 avenue Ruysdael, Paris, France
The PHAR-IN (“Competences for industrial pharmacy practice in biotechnology”) looked at whether there is a difference in how industrial employees and academics rank competences for practice in the biotechnological industry. A small expert panel consisting of the authors of this paper produced a biotechnology competence framework by drawing up an initial list of competences then ranking them in importance using a three-stage Delphi process. The framework was next evaluated and validated by a large expert panel of academics (n = 37) and industrial employees (n = 154). Results show that priorities for industrial employees and academics were similar. The competences for biotechnology practice that received the highest scores were mainly in: “Research and Development”, ‘“Upstream” and “Downstream” Processing’, “Product development and formulation”, “Aseptic processing”, “Analytical methodology”, “Product stability”, and “Regulation”. The main area of disagreement was in the category “Ethics and drug safety” where academics ranked competences higher than did industrial employees.
