“There's a real diversity of jobs available that folks don’t always think about initially when they think about going into healthcare,” says Marc Cummings, the President and CEO of Life Science Washington, a nonprofit trade association serving the life sciences industry in the state of Washington. Dr. Tina Albertson, the Chief Medical Officer at nearby Lyell Immunopharma, agrees. For instance at her company, which does R&D on cell therapies for solid tumor cancers, there’s a need for specialists in logistics who organize and monitor the movement of patient cells that need to be flown to other locations to be genetically engineered and returned to the bedside for use in treatment. As these industry veterans share with host Michael Carrese, the Seattle region is a well-established hub in the growing biotech sector due to a unique blend of strengths including longstanding non-profit research institutions and powerhouse tech companies such as Microsoft and Amazon. “This region is really well-prepared for innovation from a basic science standpoint and also from the tech side of our community,” says Albertson. Check out this revealing discussion of the challenges and opportunities in life sciences, the critical role AI and machine learning is now playing, and what they wish more people understood about clinical trials and drug development. Mentioned in this episode: https://lyell.com/https://lifesciencewa.org/