A Life in Science: Shaping early development with patient focus

New in our A Life in Science series, we hear from Mary Jane Hinrichs, Senior Vice President and Head of Early Development, about her path from discovering a passion for pharmacology to leading drug candidates through first-in-human trials. She shares how balancing strategy, science, and a constant focus on patients motivates her to shape the future of medicines.

“I was inspired to get into science from a love of learning about how drugs impact the body,” says Mary Jane Hinrichs, Senior Vice President and Head of Early Development at Ipsen. “To be quite honest, when I was in early undergrad, I did not ‘love’ the basic hard science. And it was really one day when I took a course on pharmacology and I could see how chemicals, when they go in the body, have such an impact on our day-to-day lives. It was fascinating for me, and I was so excited to be able to pursue a career in this.” 

Mary Jane’s work today is about taking drug candidates into early human trials. “My role at Ipsen as Head of Early Development is to take promising drug candidates through to early clinical proof of concept. And so, what that means is that we take the most promising modalities that we look at through external partners and shape them and develop the strategy to test them in humans for the first time.” 

She has seen discoveries with both challenges and breakthroughs. “We had an asset that had amazing pharmacology that did something that nothing else that we’ve seen before has ever been able to do. The issue with it is that it had properties that made it so that it wasn’t going to be able to be orally available… we were able to transform it into a formulation that we could get benefit out of it, and it’s now in patients and doing very well.” 

For Mary Jane, success in early development depends on one constant: “It is essential to keep the focus on the patient.”