Deb Lancaster, Service Lead (Episode 55) | Deb is leading teams who facilitate life-changing genetic research
For this episode of the Research Adjacent podcast Sarah is talking to Deb Lancaster from Genomics England. Genomics England is UK government-owned company which provides genome sequencing for the NHS and also maintains DNA databases for researchers to access. Deb is ‘kind of a head of department’ and leads five researcher-facing teams.
Facilitating life-changing research
Deb joined Genomics England in 2021 after 30 years in the pharmaceutical industry. Her current teams work with academics, clinicians and companies to help them effectively and anonymously access their huge genomic dataset. As you might expect for a leadership role, her daily routine involves a lot of meetings, but she is hugely proud of her teams and what they achieve.
“Probably the thing I’m proudest of here is the performance of my teams. I’ve got the absolute best group of people in the five teams that I look after. They’re really clever, they’re really committed, and want to make a difference to the life of the patients.”
To give a sense of the scale of their operation the database holds nearly 200,000 genomes which, in the last year alone have been used for 200 PhD and MSc theses and triggered 20 changes to clinical practice. A standout discovery for Deb was the identification of a gene called RNU 42 which is responsible for 0.4% of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Motivated to make a difference
Contributing to research which makes a difference in the world is hugely important to Deb. She completed a biology degree but a fascination with drugs and pharmacology led her into the pharmaceutical industry. There she worked in business roles including marketing, market access and operations. Highlights from this time included helping to launch the breast cancer drug Herceptin and the first CAR T-cell therapy for leukaemia.
“I remember launching it, and then the following month, hearing about a little boy who lived in Watford who was the first patient to be given it in the UK. He’d had leukemia for the last seven years. Every treatment had failed and he kept relapsing. He was the first patient to get CAR T treatment in the whole country and it worked. And as far as I’m aware he’s still okay.”
Figuring out how to get things done
Moving from the pharmaceutical industry into Genomics England has been a steep learning curve at times. First it was getting her head around the fact that genomics is more about data than biology. Then there were the differences between private and public sector bureaucracy.
“When I first joined Genomics England, I thought I would never, ever get to grips with the complexity of it. But like osmosis over the first few months you kind of absorb it. And there’s a lot of differences as well between the private and public sector. Things like procurement, are so much more complex, and rightly so. Just learning about all the different hoops that you need to jump through to get things done. I’m still learning stuff every day.”
And some of these hoops that need to be jumped through are what Deb would like to overcome with her research-adjacent magic wand. The technology exists to create RNA-based personalised treatments for rare diseases, but there is no way to get one-off treatments approved.
“If there are only a few patients with a specific variant you couldn’t have a proper product license. It couldn’t go through a NICE assessment, because there would be no clinical studies, no data, nothing, and therefore you wouldn’t get reimbursement from the NHS. So we need a different way of looking at this. We need some magic to make it so that the NHS can support these patients in getting these treatments.”
Feel the fear and do it anyway
To anyone interested in following a similar path Deb’s advice is not to plan too far ahead, to be flexible and grab opportunities, even if you are scared.
“If you’re given an opportunity, take it, because what’s the worst thing that can happen? I’ve taken roles that I’ve been terrified of taking. When I was asked to take on the market access director role every morning for the first few months, I woke up feeling like somebody had punched me in the chest. And my boss, at the time said ‘you don’t need to know anything about market access. All you need is to be able to sort people out and make sure that they’re all motivated and facing in the same direction’. And it was good advice. Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. You can always learn.”
Excellent advice indeed!
Find out more
- Connect with Deb via info@genomicsengland.co.uk
- Listen to the Behind the Genes podcast
- Find out more about Genomics England on their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube
Theme music by Lemon Music Studios from Pixabay
Episode Transcript
Deb Lancaster 00:00
If you’re given an opportunity, take it, because what’s the worst thing that can happen? Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. You can always learn A little boy who lived in Watford, and he’d had leukemia for the last seven years, he’d been in and out of hospital, and he was the first patient to get this CAR T treatment in the whole country. And it worked. I’ve got the absolute best group of people in the five teams that I look after. They’re really clever, they’re really committed, and want to make a difference to the life of the patient.
Sarah McLusky 00:31
Hello there. I’m Sarah McLusky, and this is Research Adjacent. Each episode I talk to amazing research-adjacent professionals about what they do and why it makes a difference. Keep listening to find out why we think the research-adjacent space is where the real magic happens. Hello there, and welcome to episode 55 of the Research Adjacent podcast. For this episode, I’m delighted to welcome Deb Lancaster. Deb works for Genomics England as a Service Owner. Now, if you’re wondering exactly what a Service Owner is, then you are not alone. I was too. Deb describes it as a kind of head of department role where she leads five different teams. You might also be wondering exactly what those teams do. Well, Genomics England is a unique government-owned facility, which both sequences DNA for the NHS and also maintains DNA databases for research purposes. Deb’s teams are all on the research side of things, and they help researchers to find and access the data that they need. Deb came to Genomics England three years ago after spending 30 years in the pharmaceutical industry. In our conversation, you’ll hear about some of the drugs that she has helped to launch, and the impact of some of the research projects which are using Genomics England data. You’ll also hear about why she is still learning new things every day, and why she has learned to feel the fear and do it anyway. This episode actually came about when Deanna Barac, from the behind the genes podcast got in touch to suggest a collaboration, because people who like podcasts like podcasts, right? So if you enjoy hearing about the research side of Deb’s work, then follow the link in the show notes, or just search for Behind The Genes in your podcast app to hear more about the research that Genomics England are facilitating. But for now, listen on to hear Deb’s story. Welcome along to the podcast Deb. Thank you so much for coming along to tell us a bit about what you do. Um, so yeah, shall we just start there? Tell us about your job, what it is that you do.
Deb Lancaster 02:37
Okay, it’s a bit of a complicated one, and probably a bit of a different one as well. I work as a service owner at Genomics England, which is a title, a job title that means nothing to anyone, but basically I’m kind of a head of department. So I look after five teams of people who are the user, facing the researcher, facing people within Genomics England. So those five teams consist of a team that engage with academics and clinical academics, another team who engage with our industry partners, so pharma and biotech. Then I’ve got a team called bioinformatics consulting, and they do very clever consultancy work paid for work for people who don’t have the bioinformatic capability themselves and they need to do analytics on our data set. Then I’ve got clinical research interface, which is the way we get new diagnoses to patients and enable collaboration between clinicians and researchers. And finally, Airlock, which is a really interesting one at Genomics England. Our data is all anonymized, but we have to be really, really sure that any data that comes out of our data set for publication or a conference presentation or anything like that has to be unidentifiable. So every piece of data that a researcher wants to take out of our research environment has to be checked through the air lock system. And we have a committee meeting every week, and we go through them and it just, it’s just for safety and data governance purposes. So I look after those five teams, and they’re pretty much all of the user facing researcher teams.
Sarah McLusky 04:24
Yeah, I think to help make sense of how that work that you do fits into the big picture, it’d be really helpful to hear a bit more about Genomics England and what they do. You’re almost like a library, but for DNA is what I, from what I could gather?
Deb Lancaster 04:44
Yeah, I guess, I guess you could say that. The way we’re struct So first of all, the setup, we’re a, we’re a wholly owned government organization, so we’re a limited company, but we’ve got a single shareholder, who’s the Secretary of State for Health, and obviously we’ve, we’ve all just acquired a new boss, so we’re waiting to see how that goes. And as part of that, we do, we do two main things. So we have a healthcare set up, which is where all the whole genome sequencing for the NHS is done through the Genomic Medicine Service. At the moment, we do cancer and rare disease patients, certain cancers, certain rare disease are commissioned for whole genome sequencing by the NHS. So we enable that through our sequencing partner. And then the main piece of work we do is through our bioinformatics pipelines, which are very long and very complicated algorithms that actually look at the genome of every person that has had their genome sequenced and flag any areas where there’s an actionable mutation, an actionable variant, so that we can, we can get those diagnoses and those recommendations back to the NHS. So that’s one half of the business. The other half is the research side, and that is the NGRL, which is the National Genomic Research Library. And you’re right, that’s that’s the DNA library that we hold all these data contributed very, very selflessly by our participants and by patients who consent to have their genome and healthcare data held in the NGRL, so we make that available to researchers to develop our understanding of genomic science, to make multiple new discoveries and findings, and also to develop treatments for both rare diseases and cancer. That’s kind of an overview of of what we do, and we’re, I think we’re pretty unique in the healthcare ecosystem, being a limited company, and not the NHS, but we work with the NHS. We’re very closely bound to them.
Sarah McLusky 06:53
Yeah. And is that you said they’re quite unique in terms of how you operate? Is that just in the UK, or is that internationally, that you’re quite unique.
Deb Lancaster 07:02
I’d say we’re probably no, definitely unique globally. There are quite a few DNA databases around the world, but none that I’m aware of actually have a live service serving their healthcare system. They’re purely, purely for research.
Sarah McLusky 07:21
And so if somebody wants to then, so if you got a researcher who’s trying to do some research into some, you know, like you’ve said, there are things like cancers that are associated with specific mutations and that kind of thing, they would come to you and say, This is what we’re looking for. Can we, you know, get access to this particular data set. Is that how it works? And then it goes through your air lock? Yes,
Deb Lancaster 07:46
Only when they want to take the data out of our research environment, we have a, we have a signing up process that fully accredits the researcher to make sure they’re, you know, they’re a bona fide researcher, they’re suitably qualified that they work for an institution that we’ve already usually a university that we’ve already got signed up, and they go through a raft of questions and sets and then they’re allowed into our research environment when they register a project. So a project has to be approved internally by our teams. We’ve got delegated authority for that from our Access Review Committee, which is an independent group that just makes sure we’re doing the right thing with the data that people have donated.
Sarah McLusky 08:30
Yeah, and when you say research environment, is it a physical location, or is it like an onlinething,
Deb Lancaster 08:39
It’s it’s a bit of a mixture. At the moment, we do have some huge data centers where we’ve got what we call on premise storage, but we also use a lot of cloud storage too. So it’s a mixture. But it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s all digital,
Sarah McLusky 08:58
Yeah, fascinating. No, it is. It’s just the idea of having, like, Yeah, I think people can conceive of a library, but then the idea that you’ve got this, almost as I say, kind of library of, yeah, genomic information, it’s fascinating,
Deb Lancaster 09:13
And knocking on for a couple of 100,000 individuals as well. So it’s, it’s not small, no, lots of data. There petabytes and petabytes of it
Sarah McLusky 09:23
Yeah, and I imagine that that because of having that collection of data, there have been some really amazing findings that have come out of having access to that.
Deb Lancaster 09:35
Yeach it’s it’s been incredible. Really, some of the things that have that have come out, there were a couple of papers recently where a new gene discovery was made, RNU 42 and it turned out that that single variant in that gene was responsible for 0.4% which doesn’t sound very much, but in the scheme of things, of all neurodevelopmental disorders. And it. Made a both of these papers made a really big splash when they were published, and because of those papers and the validation of those genes, we were able to go back, re look at our data set and make 120 odd new diagnoses for patients who’d been, you know, they’ve never been diagnosed, children who’ve got neuro-developmental disorders and their parents just don’t know what’s wrong with them. No, they do. And that’s really satisfying when you get, when you get things either.
Sarah McLusky 10:27
And to find, yeah, to be able to make that connection from, not just from the research, and as you say, 0.4% that’s one in 200 you know, that’s not, that’s not a tiny when you put it the other way, and but actually to make that connection to real people out in the real world, learning something about themselves,
Deb Lancaster 10:45
Absolutely, and we did an audit earlier this year of all the research projects which we had 600 nod in total since Genomics England launched the research environment, and the numbers that came back From that were amazing. So only in the past year, we’ve seen over 200 PhD and MSc theses written based on our data, 20 or so changes to clinical practice which which is good, because normally it’s early research and the patient impact is years down the road, but we’ve actually seen 20 changes to to actual clinical practice today, 150 conference presentations, 70 odd publications, lots and lots of great outputs. And it’s really good to see that the data sets being used and used to such great benefit
Sarah McLusky 11:35
That’s it doing something that really makes a difference? Excellent. Yeah. So, so coming back then, maybe a bit to your role. What you do, I’m guessing from what I’ve known of heads of department, if we stick with that analogy, your job really involves lots of meetings. Would that be fair to say?
Deb Lancaster 11:52
So many meetings. I can’t tell you how many meetings. Sometimes I yeah, I don’t even get a cup of coffee. It’s just back to back to back to back all day. But I have to say, I’ve worked in a lot of different places over the years, and my career, prior to coming to Genomics England was in pharma. And I have never worked with a better bunch of people, absolutely amazing group really, really clever and lovely as well, which is not always the case.
Sarah McLusky 12:24
Well, that’s a fantastic endorsement. Well, you’ve, you’ve hinted there that you’ve had a bit of a career journey before you’ve got to this point. So maybe tell us a bit about how you got to where you are now.
Deb Lancaster 12:36
Yeach sure. So straight from University, where I did, where I did genetics. So that is a very, very little use to me. Now it was so many thinking the values done a little bit earlier. Yeah, that’s changed a lot. So I’ve always, I’ve always had an interest in that area. And I went into the pharma industry from university because I’d gotten this going to say I’m wrong, but I’ve got some fascination with drugs and pharmacology and how different you know, different chemicals can change the way your body functions. So I went into pharma, and I stayed there for 30 plus years in a variety of different roles. And the last 14-15, years, I was on the country leadership teams for two major global pharma companies. And, you know, sometimes things in your life change, and it’s it’s time for a rethink. And I knew about Genomics England because when I was at one particular company as Genomics England launched, and there was this huge, audacious goal of sequencing 100,000 genomes, which everybody said they’ll never do that. They introduced Genomics England to the company I worked for at the time, and got them to be one of the early investors. So ever since then, and that was, that was 10 plus years ago, ever since then, I’d kind of followed the fortunes of Genomics England and always been really interested. And when I got the opportunity to change, change my career, to go into a different sector, Genomics England was the first place I thought of so I was lucky enough to already know someone who worked here. So I phoned them up and they said, Oh, we’ve got this role coming up. Apply for it. And I did and got it. And that was three years ago, and it was a bit of a shock to the system. At first, I came in as a biologist thinking, Oh, I’ll know something about what’s going on. No, no, it’s all data. There’s very little biology involved at the minute. It’s all about, how can you store that much data? How can you keep that much data safe? How can you make sure people can access it? But it, I’ve never learned as much in such a short period of time. It’s it’s great. I really enjoy it.
Sarah McLusky 14:47
It’s amazing to come to a point. You know, the thing you’ve got 30 years behind you, but you’re still learning, still learning about new things.
Deb Lancaster 14:53
Yeah, more than ever.
Sarah McLusky 14:57
Excellent. So you said there you came in as a biologist. You. Went into Pharma. So when you were in pharmaceutical industry, were you working as a as a biologist, as a researcher? And then, no,
Deb Lancaster 15:06
no, I was. My final role, two roles on the leadership team, was market access director. So I worked with NHS England and with NICE on the pricing, cost effectiveness, all the all the data and the dossiers that you needed to be able to get these drugs to patients. And I’d say the two standout things for me in my pharma career were launching a Herceptin in the UK, which has done so much good over so many years, so I’m really proud of that, and also leading the team that got nice, positive, NICE guidance for the CAR T herapy, chimeric antigen receptor therapy. What’s that for? okay? Stem cell therapy, yeah. So it was a treatment for the first the first indication was a treatment for childhood leukemia, and I remember launching it, and then the following month, hearing about a little boy who lived in Watford who was the first patient to be given it, given it in the UK, and he’d had leukemia for the last seven years. He’d been in and out of hospital. Every treatment had failed. He kept relapsing, and he was the first patient to get this, this CAR T treatment in the whole country, and it worked. And as far as I’m aware, he’s, he’s still okay, yeah. And so it’s not just in Genomics England where you get that, that kind of warm, fuzzy feeling for having done something, yeah, that’s positive in the world. Yeah, that was, that was a big deal.
Sarah McLusky 16:46
Yeach and that’s fantastic, amazing stories. And is that something that was really important to you when you were looking at what career options, what you were thinking, what journey you might go down, that you wanted something which was kind of real world impact? Yeah?
Deb Lancaster 17:01
Yeah, definitely. And I saw Genomics England as being able to couple that, that need for impact, with my passion and interest for genomics and tailored treatments, and, you know, really getting to the bottom of what’s causing a disease or a condition, and, yeah, it’s done exactly that.
Sarah McLusky 17:25
Excellent excellent. Well, so I mean, you’ve told us a little bit there about some of the things you’ve done that you’re really proud of in your pharmaceutical career. I am. You’ve not been at genomics England for that long, but are there any things that have that have happened since you’ve moved into that rule that really stand out.
Deb Lancaster 17:44
The publications that I spoke about earlier that had that big impact on so many patients in our in our data set, and I’d say generally, it’s you don’t tend to get the big the big spikes like you do in pharma. You know this drugs been launched. It’s making a difference. It tends to be more, more incremental. I think, probably, probably the thing I’m proudest of here is is more of a slow burn, and it’s, it’s the performance of my teams. I’ve got the absolute best group of people in the five teams that I look after. They’re really clever, they’re really committed and want to make a difference to the life of the patients. And think it’s rare that you have a whole company that’s got a common purpose. And you could ask anybody at Genomics England, why are you here? And it’s to make a difference to people’s lives. And you could say that in pharma, and probably 80% of people would say that, but there’s, there’s always people who aren’t in it for those reasons. So it’s, it’s really lovely to have that, that Centricity of our participants, our patients, and research for the future, at the center of everything everybody does.
Sarah McLusky 18:55
It does sound quite unique. I think most people you know, even if you think about companies, they’ll often be lots of different products or things you’re doing, but yeah, to feel like everybody’s working towards that common purpose is is quite amazing, really.
Deb Lancaster 19:07
Yeah and everybody cares about it too. Yeah. There’s nobody who thought, Oh, got to do XYZ. It’s, you know, there’s a real, a real commitment there.
Sarah McLusky 19:17
Yeah. Oh, fantastic. That’s great to hear. So although you’ve clearly done some amazing things throughout your career, I’m sure at times, there have been challenging moments as well, whether that has been in this transition into a different type of work or or just broader challenges. Is there anything you’d like to tell us about there?
Deb Lancaster 19:37
I think I’ve already mentioned one of the challenges, the data, not biology, when, when I was a complete novice at any sort of data science, and I still am, I kind of my I’ve got a very thin patina of knowledge that I can probably fool about 10% of people with, but I’ve got, I’ve got the experts that I can go to and ask them so that that was a challenge. And the steep learning curve was a challenge. When I first joined Genomics England, I thought I would never, ever get equipped with the complexity of it, but like osmosis, over the first few months, you kind of, you kind of absorb it. And there’s a lot of differences as well between the private and public sector. I used to moan a lot about bureaucracy and red tape in the private sector, but coming into the public sector is a whole different kettle of fish. So so things like, things like procurement, are so much more complex, and rightly so. You know, it’s taxpayers’ money. You can’t, you can’t go spending it willy nilly, but that’s been a challenge. Just just learning about all the different things that you need to do, the different hoops that you need to jump through to get things done. Yeah, has been Yeah. I’m still learning. I still learn stuff every day.
Sarah McLusky 20:57
Well aren’t we all but, but it sounds like, as you say, if you’ve got a great team around you, and sometimes as well, that’s, I often think that’s the sign of a great leader, is if you know what you don’t know, and you trust the people that you work with that they know what they know.
Deb Lancaster 21:12
Not necessarily true, but I’ll take.
Sarah McLusky 21:17
Oh excellent. So I do like to ask my guests to come on the podcast, because it’s lovely to talk about what’s going well, but there’s always some little things that that could be a little bit better. And if you had a magic wand, what would you like to change about the worldthat you work in?
Deb Lancaster 21:35
Oh, there’s lots of things. I think that there’d be lots of things that would just make my life easier,
Sarah McLusky 21:43
you’re allowed
Deb Lancaster 21:43
that would be selfish. So I’ll go, I’ll go for the big picture stuff. And I think in my current role, I would absolutely love it if every cancer and every rare disease patient could undergo whole genome sequencing, have their data in our research environment and get the absolute best treatment for their specific condition, and if there isn’t one, for their data to be used by researchers so that can be made available in the future. I’d love there to be a way to quickly and scalably get all these new discoveries to patients, because we we know now that we could, and I’m working on a another piece that Genomics England are involved in, that the government announced in the autumn statement last year, the rare therapies launch pad. And one of the things that we’re looking at there is looking at tailored antisense oligonucleotide. So it’s an RNA, an RNA, that’s
Sarah McLusky 22:45
I was going to say we might need an explanation of that.
Deb Lancaster 22:47
Yeah, and, and what it does, it’s a drug that is made. It’s an bit of RNA, which everybody knows because of the RNA vaccines, and it’s made to match the variant, or commonly known as a mutation, in that particular patient’s DNA, and it can, it can stop it expressing a protein, or it can make it start expressing a protein, or whatever needs to be done. It can block a bit, or it can promote a bit of the DNA. And we know that now we could, for quite a large proportion of the patients in the database, we could go to a manufacturer and work with them, or enable, enable a clever research to work with them to develop a treatment specifically for that patient. So it even if there’s only one patient in the world, you could make something that would
Sarah McLusky 23:42
and you could do it economically, yeah, like, it’s not a huge,
Deb Lancaster 23:47
it’s not, it’s not like a gene therapy, right? Yeah, something that would cost, would cost the NHS millions, but it, it wouldn’t be paracetamol,
Sarah McLusky 23:56
no, but you know what I mean, but it’s yes, but yeah, it’s more kind of feasible.
Deb Lancaster 24:00
Yeah, it’s more feasible and it, and this is my wish. I am waving a magic wand, absolutely, but at the moment, there’s no way for that. There’s no pathway within the NHS for that to get to patients, because you couldn’t, you couldn’t have a proper product license for a treatment like that, yeah, because you’d only have yes
Sarah McLusky 24:18
for one patient, you couldn’t safety test it, and all that kind of thing.
Deb Lancaster 24:22
And you know, how did, how do you do all the clinical studies on it? You can’t. If you’ve got one, two or three patients with that specific variant, you can’t. So you couldn’t have a proper product license. It couldn’t go through a NICE assessment, because, again, no clinical studies, no data, nothing, nothing to put in, and therefore you wouldn’t get reimbursement from the NHS. So we, we need a different way of looking at this. We need, we need some, some magic wand to make it so that, so that the NHS can support these patients in getting these treatments. And that’s, that’s my ambition. It’ll take a very, very long time. I’ve, I’ve no doubt, but science is there.
Sarah McLusky 25:03
That’s amazing, that the science is there, yeah, yeah, that we can do. So do something so unique to individual people. So, so what proportion, when you said you’d love it if everybody got sequence? Do you have any idea what kind of proportion of people get sequenced at the moment?
Deb Lancaster 25:20
Oh, I’d say it’s tiny out of the whole population. If you think over, over 10 years, we’ve probably got approaching 200,000 people. Yeah, that is it, yeah. So, yeah, don’t ask me to work out, no,
Sarah McLusky 25:33
That’s fine. Not very big. We can Yeah, but, but no, but, thinking about Yeah, when people are diagnosed with, you know, they’re suspected that they’re they’ve got a cancer or a rare gene related illness. Is it quite routine to to get those people sequenced already? Or is that something that we’re not there yet?
Deb Lancaster 25:53
It’s it varies. A lot of the referrals we get are from a small group of clinicians who’ve done it, they know how to do it. They keep doing it, they see the benefit. So it’s kind of a the 80/20 rule. More people could do it, more clinicians could refer to whole genome sequencing, although there is a limited list, we’ve probably got about 20 or 30 rare diseases that can be whole genome sequenced, and they’re chosen on the basis of the fact that sequencing, then completely will give some sort of actionable insight, hopefully, and a small, a small number of cancers, for instance, there’s breast cancer is is huge, but only a certain subtype of breast cancer is right to be available for whole genome sequencing. And again, it’s because you, you may well find an actionable mutation, an actionable variant there, and to help decide treatment.
Sarah McLusky 26:54
Fascinating. I’m learning a lot in this. Because even though I said maybe a bit like you, I did do, but I did a biology degree, but like, I feel like, like, you say it’s just moved on so much in 25 years that,
Deb Lancaster 27:08
yeah, definitely.
Sarah McLusky 27:13
so one final question for you, which is, if there’s anybody listening who likes the sound of your career journey. What sort of advice would you give them?
Deb Lancaster 27:25
It’s, it’s an odd career journey. So I’m not sure anybody would would want to replicate the whole thing.
Sarah McLusky 27:31
But for someone, kind of management in pharmaceutical industry or management in research type roles,
Deb Lancaster 27:41
I’d probably say, be prepared every day for something to come in from left field, and be flexible. Don’t set put your sights on a certain journey and not be prepared to deviate from that when things happen. Now, I’ve been I’ve interviewed people over the years, and when I’ve asked them, so what? What do you want to do long term, they’ve got it all mapped out. Well, I’ll be I’ll be X role in two years, and then another three years, I’ll be this third step, and I’ll be general manager in 10 years. And it’s just not feasible to plan things like that, because you’ve no idea what’s going to hit you from the side while you’re on that journey. You’ve no idea what opportunities are going to come up. And I’d probably say, if you’re given an opportunity, take it. Because what’s the worst thing that can happen there’s I’ve taken roles that I’ve been terrified of taking. I was asked to take on the market access director role donkeys years ago, and I’d never done market access. I knew nothing, and every morning for the first few months, I woke up feeling like somebody had punched me in the chest. And my boss at the time said, I asked you to do it because they’re all fighting with each other, and they need somebody to go in and make them play nicely and work well together. You don’t need to know anything about market access. All you need is to be able to sort people out and make sure that they’re all motivated and facing in the same direction. And it was good advice. Yeah, so don’t, don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. You can always learn and grab an opportunity, even if it scares you.
Sarah McLusky 29:19
Yeah, I do think that’s excellent advice. I think there is, I think, of all the people I’ve interviewed in this podcast, there’s maybe been about two or three who have actually come out of university. There’s something they wanted to do, and they went and did it, and they are very much the minority. So, yeah, good advice. Well, if somebody wants to find out more about you or the work you do, where, where might be, the Where might need direct people. Oh, dear.
Deb Lancaster 29:53
Okay. Well, at Genomics England, we’ve got a great website that covers all the different. Areas that that we focus on. We’ve got a podcast called Behind The Genes, which comes out every so often, entirely sure on the frequency, but it’s really varied and good. And there’s some, there’s some really excellent, excellent guests on those podcasts. So I would recommend those. And for a specific query, we’ve got an information email so it’s info@genomicsengland.co.uk, and that will be triaged by the central team and sent to the person who can hopefully answer your question.
Sarah McLusky 30:33
Yeah fantastic. Well, I’ll get links to those as well, and I’ll put them all into the show notes so that it just remains to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come along and tell us about your career journey and tell us about Genomics England. Thank you.
Deb Lancaster 30:49
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Sarah McLusky 30:55
Thanks for listening to Research Adjacent. If you’re listening in a podcast app, please check you’re subscribed and then use the links in the episode description to find full show notes and to follow the podcast on LinkedIn or Instagram. You can also find all the links and other episodes at www.researchadjacent.com. Research Adjacent is presented and produced by Sarah McLusky, and the theme music is by Lemon Music Studios on Pixabay, and you, yes you, get a big gold star for listening right to the end. See you next time.
