Not infrequently, companies lure professors to highly paid positions directing scientific research in pharmaceuticals, technology, and related fields. But the recent departures of some leading Harvard scientists deeply committed to improving human health point to a different phenomenon: challenges to conducting translational life-sciences research in academic settings. Given the University’s emphasis on and investment in the life sciences and biomedical discovery, these scientists’ differing decisions suggest emerging issues and concerns about current constraints and the future of such research.
Applying for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants can take a substantial portion of an investigator’s time, and as much as a year can pass between a submission deadline and the point when funds are received and disbursed by the recipient’s home institution. With the NIH the dominant funding source for university biomedical research, what’s at stake is not only the ability of academic institutions to remain at the cutting edge of biomedical discovery, but also their ability to attract and train the next generation of scientific talent. The typical for-profit pharmaceutical or biotechnology company can move far more quickly and mobilize vastly greater resources—from top-notch facilities to copious funding—enabling the private sector to rapidly move basic science research discoveries to the point of clinical application. Increasingly, researchers committed to improving human health wonder whether working within the constraints of university research settings is really in the public interest.
Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology who advocated for widespread COVID-19 rapid testing during the pandemic to enable employees to return to work, left the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2021; he is now chief science officer for eMed, which develops personal health tests for consumers. In 2022, Douglas Melton, the pioneering stem-cell researcher who has dedicated his professional life to curing type 1 diabetes, left a prestigious University Professorship for Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he is working to speed translation of his discoveries into clinically useful treatments. And Stuart Schreiber, a renowned chemical biologist who spent decades at Harvard teaching and conducting research on therapeutic targets in humans, and drugs that could repair broken biological pathways, left in January 2024 to lead the science enterprise at Arena Bioworks, a new nonprofit biomedical research and development institute designed to enable research unencumbered by traditional academic and federal requirements.
Harvard Magazine asked these scientists for their perspectives on the academic model for research and training in the biomedical sciences, and how it compares to the private sector. Against the backdrop of broad democratization of biological tools and knowledge, some themes emerged beyond struggles with federal funding; these included inadequate pay for postdoctoral fellows (who do much of the pioneering work in labs) and research slowed by timelines optimized for academic training, publishing, and degree-granting rather than human health. Their own words (edited for length and clarity) follow. Background commentary appears in italics.
Michael Mina
At the peak of the pandemic crisis, when Mina was advising the Biden White House, he was encouraged instead to focus more on research and lab duties.
On urgent priorities vs. sluggish institutions:
I understand the sentiment to a degree, but in the middle of a pandemic, the School of Public Health was not supportive of our extraordinary efforts. Things like the [University-wide] hiring freeze should not have extended to the academics who were working at the front lines. Despite bringing in $10 million in philanthropy and grants, I couldn’t get the school to bend and allow me to hire somebody who could help even with scheduling. And it just burned me out to such an exceptional degree. It was clear that the School of Public Health didn’t have this bent toward putting into practice the research, and placed pure academic publishing and grant-getting above all else. That just felt like a serious miss.
On federal funding:
NIH [National Institutes of Health] funding is an antiquated system that is handicapping innovation. When you’re trying to implement something in an emergency setting, the timetables don’t work [when funding can take a year to reach scientists]. NIH did figure out some new funding streams to implement things more quickly, and I was doing very well getting money from the NIH. But the process is long and cumbersome. And industry funding is orders of magnitude greater. A lot of the most impactful researchers are recognizing it. [A typical NIH grant might range from $580,000 to $610,000 total, usually disbursed in smaller sums over four or five years.]
It’s no secret that institutions prefer to get large grants from the federal government because they can recover massive fractions of indirect costs [costly building and lab overhead expenses]. The pandemic opened different channels of funding for researchers, including some that didn’t incorporate government grants. For example, a donor wanted to give $2 million to my lab, but only wanted to allow a maximum 10 percent to go to indirect cost recovery. And the school declined to receive the $2 million because they wanted at minimum, I believe it was 20 percent. That was one of those moments, when I just said “What the hell am I doing?” Here I am trying to battle the pandemic, trying to raise funds to do basic science. I was successful in getting a lot of funds, brought a lot to the Broad Institute [a major genomics research center], to start a testing program. But here’s my home department, you know, not allowing my laboratory to take on a $2 million gift. I understand they don’t want to set bad precedent that’s going to make the institution have difficulty getting enough funds in the long run. But there are times when academia should be more flexible. I found that the school was unable to realize that.
On the nature of collaboration:
Academia is not really collaborative. In industry, I have to collaborate with equals. In my first week after leaving Harvard, I sat down in a room with eight other executives, and for the first time, I was with eight other full-grown, working adults who had the identical goal in mind, although we came at it from different angles. And I realized that I didn’t know how to be a leader in a true team effort: there’s a real negotiation that has to happen. And it taught me so much that if I go back into academia one day, I think I will be a much, much better investigator and leader for having this experience.
On student and postdoc defections to industry:
Ph.D. programs aren’t going anywhere, but industry is attracting the best and the brightest for a lot of reasons. The ease of setting up technology and technological platforms is a major component of why so much basic research is moving out of academia. Practically anyone with a garage these days can do profound studies, relative to just 15 to 20 years ago. It’s then supercharged by economics: academic institutions that are really high-powered, like Harvard, tend to be in more expensive cities, and the paylines of Ph.D. students and postdocs haven’t really changed, and certainly haven’t kept up with inflation. It’s hard to live on $60,000 in Boston. And industry is offering people $120,000 to $150,000 right out of the gate with a Ph.D., if not $300,000.
It is not just salary, but also speed and efficiency, and it’s quality of life. You get to go home at night, and not worry about putting in overtime to get your grant read. Fifteen to 20 years from now, institutions like Harvard will still exist and will still be extremely important mainstays of innovation. But the average professor is going to have an increasingly difficult time getting the best postdocs because they’re going to go to Biogen, they’re going to go to Genentech, they’re going to go to Thermo Fisher, where they get paid in a way that seems to satisfy them, and they feel like they have opportunity. We’re already seeing that happen.
What aspect of the University he misses:
When you’re at a place like Harvard, almost every person you bump into is super bright and super thoughtful and creative and is thinking about how to change the world in their own unique way. I didn’t realize how privileged I was to have 95 percent of my work interactions be with that caliber of person. I desperately miss that creativity. I miss waking up every day and thinking about new questions in new ways.
Industry does not have the same diversity. My lab was doing all kinds of different things, working on multiple sclerosis, the pandemic, basic biology and biotech development. And I miss that.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how do I get back into academia without running an R01-funded lab? [The Research Project (R01) grant is NIH’s oldest and most common funding mechanism for supporting health-related research and development.] I am pretty sure I can get back into it and be a very successful researcher…[but] the idea of moving back into academia and running an R01-funded lab almost feels silly—like, after being in an industry…on any given day, we’re talking about starting a program that’s going to cost $15 million, or $10 million—the amount of money is much greater. So it feels like the joke would be on me if I were to run back and start a new lab. On the other hand, what I miss massively is the intellectual caliber of the environment and the creativity of the environment.
Douglas Melton
Melton expressed similar sentiments about the caliber of Harvard students and colleagues. He was recently named a Catalyst professor, a new, untenured five-year appointment that will allow him to mentor Harvard students without being bound by the usual teaching requirements. The arrangement does not, however, establish a means of educating students in industry settings. He would like to see universities partner with the private sector in the education of students seeking advanced degrees, which would require assent and cooperation from both directions, and he laments that the right model for effecting such an arrangement has not yet been invented.
On the scale and speed of research funding:
NIH funding has not grown as fast as the biomedical research field. For example, Harvard was the first to have a stem-cell department. Now, lots of universities have them, just as every university has a molecular biology department. There’s been growth in the NIH budget, but not commensurate with the opportunities in the field. That means that years ago, biologists at Harvard might write one NIH grant. Now they have to write two or three just to keep the lights on, and maybe four or five to do cutting-edge biology. Polls have shown that principal investigator biologists now spend up to 40 percent of their time—it’s a shocking number, 40 percent of their time—writing grants.
In industry, the funding allows for very rapid change. There’s no writing a grant and waiting six months to see if it could get funded, and then waiting another six months for the university to make arrangements to receive the funds. The speed with which you can move into a new area is not comparable.
On the proliferation of basic research opportunities:
Years ago, the pharmaceutical industry rarely did discovery research. But now, pharmaceutical companies do basic science. That’s been a good shift, in my opinion, but it’s been a shift.
“The computational resources, the sequencing, the chemical screening— it’s not comparable to what we can do in any university.”
Acting with speed in the private sector:
Everything gets done much quicker. For example, when you want to file for a patent at a company, the next morning there are two patent attorneys in your office ready to write that patent. The computational resources, the sequencing, the chemical screening— it’s not comparable to what we can do in any university. It’s a whole order of magnitude different.
On finding additional ways to train students in industry settings:
Why can’t we find a way—since many of our undergraduates and graduates will end up working in industry—why can’t we find a way for them to do their studies and their Ph.D. and their postdoctoral work in conjunction with Harvard, with MIT, and with Vertex? There are reasons for that, but we haven’t been imaginative enough to think about a compromise.
Stuart Schreiber
Schreiber has been CEO of Arena Bioworks, a biomedical research institute, since January 2024. (He remains a research professor at Harvard.)
Schreiber describes Arena as “an unproven model” that borrows best practices from three sources: the government funding model; venture capital funding; and privately supported, University-affiliated institutions such as the Broad and the Wyss Institutes. (Schreiber founded Vertex Pharmaceuticals in 1989 and was a cofounder of the Broad Institute in 2004.) With financial resources provided by wealthy investors, Arena provides everything necessary to build a discovery into a company: from funding courtesy of those billionaire investors; to technical expertise housed in one of six research platforms such as AI, gene editing, and manufacturing; to physical space where a newly fledged company can operate with access to all these resources.
“Suddenly I could see how things could be done very rapidly...I thought, okay, the system works. But there are some inefficiencies that maybe a new structure could address.”
What pandemic-era research revealed:
During COVID, when biomedical research was highly focused on solving a problem that theoretically could have been an existential one, that galvanized the whole scientific community. And suddenly, I could see how things could be done very rapidly. Vaccines developed at lightning speed. It was remarkable. I thought, okay, the system works. But there are some inefficiencies that maybe a new structure could address. That’s the origin of Arena Bioworks.
The changed research landscape during Schreiber’s academic career:
The world of figuring out basic mechanisms in biology, and the world of translating new medicines [turning research discoveries into clinically approved therapies], were completely different activities then. Today, one student could run an experiment using a genome editing tool and change the mutant allele that’s causal for cystic fibrosis into the healthy wild-type one; that is a very doable experiment over a couple of months by a single undergraduate. And if you do that, now maybe it’ll take just six months to do experiments on the relevant cell types and see what changed from the disease state to the healthy state. It’s not that far from thinking, how do I make this happen in human patients?
The technology has changed so that the gap between basic science and medicine is almost nonexistent. We are at a point in time when a basic experiment has direct implications for human health. Yet we’ll need to go through a set of focused activities of preclinical research, and in clinical research, that are just not easy to do quickly in a university setting. They’re better in a biotech setting.
Companies vs. colleges:
I am a real believer in the idea of creating highly focused biotech companies where everyone is on board with the same vision and passion and determination to solve a major unmet medical need. In the academic world, you may have some of that focus, but you also have to nurture the careers of trainees, and projects are selected and advanced with the idea of allowing the student to write a thesis; it may or may not turn out exactly as you wish. But you’re not going to stop the project, because it’s about the training exercise. Of course, that’s what I really liked.
However, there are the inefficiencies. If we make a discovery in my [Harvard] lab and I see a translation potential, I talk to tech transfer and get University support. I talk to venture capitalists and get them to be involved. If we’re lucky, we get through that gauntlet, then we find space and lease it. We use those precious dollars to reproduce the lab and, in some respects, a lot of capital equipment investment, to build a whole separate lab. But basically, to see if the result is reproducible and scalable—and is it truly relevant to the human condition? That is a very long arc; the overall process could be seven years.
Once you’re through all of that, often the fundamental discoveries continue to advance in your own lab. But because the biotech system has to be a for-profit one—or venture capitalists won’t invest—there are conflict issues. You can’t just relay the new results going on in the academic lab. They remain internal to the lab until they’re eventually published and so forth. And then the company can gain access to that information. And I understand why that is. But is it in patients’ best interest or the best interests of the health of our society? I’m not so sure; it seems like a little bit inefficient.
Will more talented young researchers leave the academy for the private sector or institutes like Arena? Or is there a possibility of synergistic cooperation?
Basic biomedical research to understand the mechanisms of disease in the context of human physiology is done by including postdoctoral trainees. We’ve had some universities come to us and say, “Could our graduate students train with you?” So that’s something we are seriously considering, but we just haven’t addressed it at this stage. But postdocs, yes. Lots of physician-scientists love to do training like this because there’s a strong connection between human biology and human health. And all of that work will be published, no differently than at Harvard University or the Broad Institute, because our goal is to facilitate the translation of basic biology into new medicines.
How Arena can complement the other models—and improve on them:
We don’t write government grants. We don’t have government funding. We don’t have philanthropic funding. We don’t have corporate funding. We don’t have any of that. And when we build a company, we don’t have venture funding. It’s private funding from the investors who think it’s a worthwhile experiment. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t work, but it’s worth it because if we could make the biomedical system more efficient, then society will benefit. New medicines will be delivered more rapidly.
What we try to do in Arena is to work on a disease where we have what’s called a biomarker, some easily measurable metabolites in the urine or in the blood. And the biomarker is linked to the mechanism, so [when the biomarker changes in response to a therapy], that gives us great confidence that the drug is doing what we want it to do: it’s moving the target in the right direction. And this makes the later stages of clinical trials often much more rapid, and at lower expense, because you no longer need a very long clinical trial to ask if there is a survival benefit. There are some pretty dramatic examples recently where the Food and Drug Administration has informed companies that because they ran these clinical trials in this modern way, they’re allowing them to skip the phase two and go right to a smaller focus phase three trial.*
Designing a research ecosystem for rapid gains in human health:
We selected our investors very, very thoughtfully and carefully, the way we’ve selected our scientists. Are we aligned on our mission, which is to mitigate suffering and death from disease? If we have that, we’ll solve a lot of problems.
*Phase 1 trials test safety and dosage in a small number of volunteers, while phase 2 trials tests efficacy and side effects in as many as several hundred people for up to two years. Traditionally, phase 3 trials that test efficacy and monitor adverse reactions involve 300 to 3,000 people with the targeted disease or condition and last one to four years.
