Dr Arne Sprünken has had a successful 16-year career working for German pharmaceutical company Grünenthal and continues to thrive within the company. However, Arne started his professional life as a physician. His passion for medicine and caring for patients began at the age of 14, when he worked as a nurse as part of a work experience scheme.
He continued to work in nursing at weekends during his time at school, before undergoing training as a paramedic as part of his military service and being deployed in the air accident response unit at a military airport. Due to his positive experiences in nursing and emergency medicine, Arne decided to study medicine after completing his military service.
“I went on to study medicine at university in Aachen which wasn’t too far from my home town and it meant I could continue to work as a nurse at weekends. I loved the course but couldn’t decide which discipline to settle on, as I was interested in cardiology, neurology and anaesthesiology.”
Arne completed his doctorate at the Medical University of Aachen with an animal experimental, pharmacological thesis in the field of neurology. He started his first job as a working anaesthetist in a small country hospital in 2003, where he received broad and solid training in the fields of anaesthesia and intensive care medicine. During this time, Arne also completed further qualifications in emergency medicine and carried out his first missions as an emergency doctor.
Arne later moved twice to larger hospitals, to learn further skills such as regional anaesthesia and pain therapy and to specialize more in intensive care medicine.
A career crossroads
In 2008, to gain more work life balance while raising a young family, Arne decided to look for a different job outside the hospital and was unsure in which direction he should head. He knew Grünenthal, a mid-size RnD based pharma company headquartered in Aachen and he felt that maybe this could be a good fit, but he was not sure how he might fit in the pharma industry. Was it medical or clinical or somewhere else? After a lot of thought, Arne decided on pharmacovigilance, as there seemed to be a lot of overlap with his previous job as an anaesthetist, such as patient safety, physiology and pharmacology.
‘It felt like it was an area where I could still use some of the skillset I had and that I enjoyed from my clinical work. But also, I thought I could use my strengths in a company that specialised in pain medicine.’
Arne applied and happily got the job as medical advisor in drug safety. Amongst others, he worked on global brands such as Tramadol and Tapentadol, was the drug safety project lead for clinical drug development programs from phase 1 to phase 4, and acted for many years as the lead drug safety function in over 100 business development projects at Grünenthal. These included small molecules, biologicals, advanced therapy medicinal products and medical devices, as well company acquisitions. Grünenthal offered Arne the opportunity to study health economics alongside his job. In his master's thesis, he analysed the role of patient preference assessments in health technology appraisals in Germany.
Role changes at Grünenthal
In 2019, Arne became therapeutic area head for one of the Safety & Benefit Risks teams at Grünenthal Global Drug Safety. For four years he was heading a team of physicians and pharmacists, managing Grünenthal’s opioid medicinal products and a large product portfolio in the Latin American market. In early 2024, Arne changed therapeutic area and took over another Safety & Benefit Risks team which is focused on Grünenthal’s clinical development projects.
As a member of the Global Drug Safety leadership team at Grünenthal, Arne is assigned business process owner for certain PV processes. This included periodic safety reports in the past and still includes Risk Management.
Even after 16 years, Arne still describes his work at Global Drug Safety as exciting and varied. This is partly due to changes within Grünenthal and the many opportunities to get involved in different projects within the company, but also due to constantly changing external circumstances, such as changes in PV legislation.
‘I’ve never regretted my decision to change career direction. There’s always change, whether that’s internal restructures, change in company strategy, new markets and new products or changes from external sources e.g. new business partners or new regulations. So, there’s a constant evolution which I love.’
Working with Insife since 2023
When he took on business process ownership for Risk Management, he realised that the existing process was far from excellent and not really fit for the future regarding Grünenthal’s business development plans. It was mainly using MS Excel rather than any kind of comprehensive system and he thought it could be managed far better. So, he set out to find the right solution and chose HALOPV and Insife, starting to work together in 2023.
Grünenthal has initially taken two of the HALOPV modules to work with, Risk Management and Signals. The Risk Management process went live in April 2024 while Signals is still in the development stage, but Arne is very happy with how the partnership is working.
‘The team at Insife have proven to offer a very customer-oriented service to us with excellent project management. In comparison with other tools, HALOPV has been so flexible to work with our existing processes and we’ve not had to adapt ours to fit their software.’
It’s always been about patient care
Whether it was in Arne’s work experience as a nurse at the age of 14, his successful career as an anaesthetist, or his subsequent thriving career in PV, there has been one common denominator. It all stems from the same passion, that of patient care and patient safety and it’s clear that he will continue to put that front and centre of any role that he takes on in the future.
‘The key to my happiness in work is that I’m still patient focussed which has been so important to me from when I first stepped on a ward at the age of 14. Also, my med school training and hospital experience is still completely useful and relevant. For me I found what I wanted, work that is all about patient care, but is so much better than hospitals for a good work life balance.’