PTC was founded by a medical school professor who understands and encourages continuous lifetime learning. I admire this approach.

Seven years ago, I was new to PTC and understood that funds were tight. We had limited cash on hand, and no approved products. We believed two things at that time:

  1. PTC was on track for an approval – and achieved that milestone about 11 months later
  2. We needed to invest in our employees

Before we achieved our first approval, we began investing in developing stronger leaders and teams. Tools such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® personality inventory enabled us to identify and understand how our behaviors impact others. We developed a compliance training program to meet our quality and compliance needs and provide expanded training opportunities for PTC team members. We built a talent management program to provide leadership essentials training, Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI®) assessments, and an overarching human resource business partner structure to help put these programs into practice.

We created a COVID-19 Task Force, operating 24/7 to ensure our facilities are safe places to work. Our IT and Facilities teams are providing the resources we need to be successful, working both at home and on site. These teams, in collaboration with others, have developed new work environments, new processes and procedures, new apps, and new dashboards to support our needs.

We are growing and hiring, developing careers with purpose for passionate, hard-working, committed people. We are also building a new gene therapy research and manufacturing site, acquiring and nurturing scientific partners, running clinical trials to establish the safety and efficacy of our small molecule therapies…all while the world copes with the global pandemic and looks ahead to having a safe and effective vaccine and approved COVID-19 therapies to treat this virus. PTC is currently investigating our PTC299 small molecule therapy as a potential treatment for COVID-19.

We also launched a robust fellowship program (the Talent Pipeline Program or TPP) to provide recent graduates real-world experience in the biopharmaceutical industry and related professions. To date, we have more than 40 participants.

Thanks to our founder and CEO Stu Peltz, every PTC employee took the Gallup® CliftonStrengths assessment and training in 2020. This not only represents a financial investment in our workforce, but a commitment to the growth and development of our people. We are providing Gallup training to our leaders on how to shift from being “bosses” to becoming “coaches.” This makes managers better at leading and developing talented people.

And as a farmer always worries about the health of a field before planting seeds, we are constantly focused on the health of our culture – investing in engagement during times of disruption. With a great culture, we can all continue to develop and be able to do what we do best at work every day.