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Clifford Samuel is a senior
director at Gilead Sciences
He’s involved with a cross-section of departments
at the biopharmaceutical company: regulatory,
government affairs, manufacturing and more
 Infectious diseases impact millions of people worldwide, and life-saving medicines are needed everywhere. As senior director for international access operations for Gilead Sciences, Inc (Foster City, CA), Clifford Samuel oversees a fascinating and challenging global business. It’s his job to ensure sustainable access to Gilead’s innovative medicines in 130 countries. The territory represents two-thirds of the countries in the world, and the regions hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Gilead Sciences discovers, develops and commercializes drugs to treat HIV/AIDS and associated infections, liver disease, and serious cardiovascular and respiratory conditions. The company developed Tamiflu, one of the few effective treatments for influenza. More than three quarters of its approximately 4,000 worldwide employees are in the U.S., the rest in sixteen other countries, including Canada.
The company’s access program provides HIV/AIDS drugs to the least-developed countries at reduced prices.
Committed to excellence
In 1987 Gilead entered the new field of biopharmaceuticals. It went public in 1992 and has grown mainly through strategic acquisitions. The most recent acquisition was CV Therapeutics (Palo Alto, CA) this April.
Samuel joined the company in 1996 and became a senior director in 2005. He works with domestic and foreign government agencies, as well as medical associations and nonprofit social service organizations. He has a hand in regulatory activities, government affairs, manufacturing and more.
“We develop the process and then contract it out to a manufacturer,” he says. “We’ve found
we can be more nimble in our decision-making that way.”
As a manager, Samuel is committed to excellence: “ensuring that you can do it well every time, and if you make a mistake, being able to assess it quickly and correct it,” he says. “Whatever the problem is, you need to drill down and fix it, not linger on why and whose
fault it is.”
Pursuing excellence also pays off, he believes, because the knowledge you gain is yours forever, adding to your expertise and creating the basis for successful leadership. “You will be able to speak with confidence about an area of expertise and become a true leader,” he says.
“Engineering is about processes,” he adds. “Managing and leading people is about establishing a mission and a vision.”
Starting positions
Samuel didn’t see pharmaceutical management in his future when he received his BSME from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1988. His first job was at Maxwell House Coffee, then in Hoboken, NJ; it gave him the engineering environment he was looking for. But the company relocated to Texas, and Samuel moved to a job at a high-end data and voice technology equipment company, Tecnimat/ TDS. He started as an application engineer and went on to sales, cold-calling in a difficult market.
That tough sales experience was the qualification he needed to win a pharmaceutical rep position with ICI Pharmaceuticals in 1990; in 1992 he moved on to Glaxo Pharmaceuticals,
now GlaxoSmithKline, in Brentford, Middlesex, UK. He helped establish the new Cerenex pharmaceutical division, launching Zofran and Imitrex, which became leading products in the oncology and central nervous system markets.
At Glaxo, he also helped launch 3TC and market AZT, both key treatments for HIV/AIDS. By 1996, when he joined Gilead, he had the background and experience to launch Gilead’s first product for CMV retinitis, an infection associated with HIV/AIDS.
Involvement
Gilead began a pilot mentoring program this year. “Gilead is only twenty-two years old,” Samuel says. “The organization is still evolving and is in the process of establishing internships and leadership development training.”
Samuel serves on the community advisory board of the University of California-San Francisco AIDS health project, where he leads fundraising projects that Gilead employees are encouraged to be involved in.
Success in a tough world
Samuel grew up in a tough environment, immigrating to Newark, NJ in 1977 from St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the West Indies. He was thirteen. His parents divorced and the family struggled in the unfamiliar city.
Samuel feels his education equipped him to succeed in the professional workplace and gave him the skills he needed to get the most out of his sales and management training. An open mind, attention to details and a strong work ethic usually triumph in the end, he believes.
At least, he has found it so.
D/C
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