Biopharma - 20026

Students taking these two courses will have coordinated opportunities to study the global pharmaceutical industry, which has grown into a multibillion-dollar enterprise merging economic principles and biomedical research to develop and distribute therapeutics around the world. Students in BIO 112  are introduced to modern cell and molecular biology in both lecture and laboratory settings; those in ECON 112  are introduced to the behaviors of economic markets, pricing and product distribution. The Biopharma connection will engage Cells and Genes students in discussing the economic implications of the biomedical research they discuss and engage Microeconomics students in the process of biological research.

Shared lecture topics illustrating important principles from both biological and economic perspectives will include vaccine development and distribution, drug therapy and human cloning, and the human genome project. Through independent laboratory research in the Cells and Genes lab, students will have the opportunity to do an independent research project in which they design and perform their own experiments, analyze and present their own data and make their own scientific discoveries. This project will offer students invaluable insights into the scientific process and into the inevitable pitfalls and occasional breakthroughs that accompany scientific discovery-insights critical to understanding why R&D budgets are so big in the pharmaceutical industry.