Dr. Jaber is the Director of Comparative Medicine East at Abbvie
Dr. Samer Jaber is a lab animal veterinarian at Abbvie. Veterinarians play a vital and longstanding role in the research process. When biopharmaceutical companies identify a new drug to target a human disease, veterinarians are needed to answer safety and efficacy questions when the drug is used in whole animals. Samer leads a team of interdisciplinary professionals to care for the health and wellbeing of the lab animals, mostly mice and rats, and participates in the ethical review process for the studies. “You take an oath when you become a vet [that] says you will use your scientific knowledge and skills for the benefit of society.. through the protection of animal resources and welfare.”
Though Samer knew he wanted to be a small animal vet since he was little, he did not apply to Vet School right out of college. Instead, he worked in a lab group at a medical school in the Midwest, entering as an animal care technician. After he mentioned to some of the professionals there that he wanted to go to vet school, one involved him in a mouse thyroid imaging project and encouraged him to think broadly about what was possible in animal care. Samer’s career has included not only successful admission and completion of vet school but also time spent in veterinary private practice, in animal emergency rooms near Philadelphia and in NYC, as a research resident at UPenn, and full-time work in lab animal veterinary care, first in an academic setting and now in biopharma.
As a child of immigrants, Samer was the first in his family to earn a college degree and the only to earn a DVM, which is a four year professional degree program pursued after graduation from an undergraduate college or university. And though there were times in his career when he didn’t know exactly what kind of a veterinarian he wanted to be, he learned to overcome his introversion and make his general aspirations known. Once he did, people could — and did — offer to help.