The Science of Business: Patsy Carney talks Business and Innovation in Life Sciences
We’re glad to be back for another episode of our Explore Life Sciences Podcast!
Thanks to everyone who’s listening to our episodes each month, we are thrilled with the response and we look forward to producing many more episodes in the weeks and months to come! If this is your first time tuning in or discovering our podcast – Explore Life Sciences is a podcast about the Irish and Global Life Sciences industries and the people who are leading change. Each month we talk to a different guest throughout the various sectors of Life Sciences on topical conversations and how they ended up where they are today.
Meet Our Guest: Patsy Carney
Waterford native Patsy Carney has more than 30 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry and has held senior positions in a number of pharma companies in Ireland and UK in both operations and business development. He co-founded pharma company EirGen, which was bought by US company Opko in 2015 for $135m. Carney is now the director of Kinetic Labs, a new purpose-built science innovation centre in Waterford, which acts as a private ‘rent a lab’ space for the region.
Have you always been interested in science? Or did your business head grow out of something that you gravitated towards naturally?
In school I was studying accountancy and chemistry and I always found the business side of it interesting and I didn’t find it that difficult. In work, I very quickly I moved away from lab bench and it’s been a long time since I’ve worn a lab cost and done some work in a lab. I’ve been veering towards more management/leadership positions in a company so I quickly went that direction. Again getting to that point in my career, it would be good to have a more formalised qualification in what I’ve been doing 19 years at that stage. The best was to go way the MBA program because it draws on your experience in your career to date and puts more structure around it. Areas like strategy, development and so on.
I ended up at a crossroads in my career. Two things were really coming up. One was really move to the headquarters of Ivax in Florida or potentially think about starting a company. We looked at option A and option B. Option B was to stay in Tramore and build a company. That’s where EirGen came out of. And it was a very quick conversation from so that’s what we did. A conversation, a year or MBA Oct/ Nov and the end of December I actually left
You make it sound easy!
It takes that step off the cliff to go and its a pretty big one its an issue in terms of the start up environment in which with most multinationals in the FDI area. They pay well, the comps and benefits are good. It makes it very difficult to step off the cliff to go forward with something on your own. There’s huge risk involved but I had Tom, and there was the two of us, stepping of the cliff together and that made a big difference.
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