[沃得活动] 沃得学子在知名公司实习中找到“未来”

November 1st, I visited CTC bio company for studying. CTC is a company specialized in researching and developing animal medicine, viral medicine and human medicine. The purpose of the visit was to learn about the process of medicine invention and the apparatus used in the production.

Firstly, a researcher of the company gave me a short lecture about the development of new kind of medicine. He at first defined the process to be enormously long and sometimes vapid. The first step of developing a medicine is screening the candidates for the ingredients of the medicine. The candidates can be millions of different herbs. After the primary winnow, there will be still a large amount of candidates left. The researcher explained that this process is like finding a needle in an ocean, the probability of getting viable selection for the correct target is extremely small. When some plausible candidates are selected, they still need to undergo numerous experiments. Since those medicines are brought to people, they must be checked for toxicity and side affect to various objects. The checking process will start from bring medicine to the animals to check for toxicity, then to the ordinary people to check for the side effects, and then to the patient to check for the effect of the medicine. 

      
       Commonly, the checking process will take about five to seven years, since some side effect or the effectiveness of medicine can be observed only over long time. Even if a medicine successfully passed all those painstaking processes, they must be carefully examined for environmental and financial aspects. Even if one of these factors justified the medicine to be impractical, the efforts of the years will be vanished. 
      
       While explaining the process of medicine development, the researcher also lamented the situation of small medicine company. Most small medicine companies, once found a plausible ingredient for a target, can hardly afford the expenditure of following checking process, thus they would sell the project plan to the big companies. Once big companies developed a medicine with the project bought from the small companies, they would gain a huge amount of profits while leaving small companies gain nothing. Consequently, the difference between the big company and small company will become more distinctive and small entrepreneurs can no more sustain the business. I think the corruption exists a lot in this kind of pharmacy companies---deceiving the multitudes for profits, corrupting the doctors and hospitals for more selling. Such sort of deceiving and corrupting must be regulated by more strict law and meticulous inspection.
      
       After the presentation, I visited the mechanical apparatus for medicine production. Most production was completed by machines. However, what surprised me a lot was not high-technology that everyone expects, but the detailed consideration paid by every sequence of the production. For example, the pressure of the air in each rooms are slightly different from each other. The air was designed to blow from the less contaminated area to more contaminated room. Also, the doors cannot be opened if another door connect to another area is not completely closed. I was astonished by those details in the designs of the production and the attention paid upon it. 
 

      

       The overall impression I got from the visiting to the CTC bio company was that the medicine making is a extremely detailed works that requires patience and persistence. It was good to know about a job that is closely related to the biology which is my favorite subject. I imagined the future image of myself in that building for some seconds.