Take former HHMI investigator Richard Scheller, for example. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Scheller left Stanford University in January 2001 to become senior vice president of research at Genentech. His reasoning reflects the thinking of most biologists who go from campus to company: "I wanted to help with unmet medical needs by applying my scientific knowledge in a more direct way than through fundamental biochemical research." Scheller's work at Stanford focused on the organization and fusion of cellular membranes. He hopes that his intimate knowledge of the cell surface will contribute to the creation of agents that attack tumor cells specifically.

Some researchers, such as Andrew Chan, hold the combined M.D.-Ph.D. degree, indicating a long-standing interest in direct patient care. Chan left Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis last August to join Genentech as senior director of immunology. He thus joins Scheller both in venue and motivation. "At this particular point in my life," says Chan, "I saw in industry the potential to do more translational medicine and to have a significant impact on developing therapeutics or understanding certain disease processes at a deeper level." He plans to direct his major research interest—the signaling mechanisms that regulate T and B lymphocyte function—toward therapies that might interfere with autoimmune reactions.

Corey Goodman, also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, left the University of California, Berkeley, last September to become president and chief executive officer of Renovis, a biopharmaceutical company he cofounded in February 2000. "I've had a lab for 23 years," he notes, "and it was very satisfying. But as you get older you start to think that it would be nice to push along those applications for human health." Goodman's observations of axon guidance and brain wiring in fruit flies will now inform such areas as human spinal cord injury and neurodegenerative disease.

Ask Peter S. Kim why he decided to leave the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the

question seems almost obtuse, considering that the position he assumed in February 2001 is executive vice president of research and development at Merck & Co. "You didn't just leave academia for industry," a visitor says, "you were offered the chance to manage the Yankees!" Kim laughs at the comparison. "Well," he responds, "I'm a Boston Red Sox fan, but I understand the analogy." Kim, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine, says that when this opportunity came along, "I leapt at it. It was a real chance to have a tremendous impact on human health." One such application may derive from Kim's studies of the molecular basis of viral infection, which have obvious potential for pharmaceuticals. "In the past, I used to say that if my work led to the development of a real drug or a real vaccine, I would view that as one of my major accomplishments in life," he says.

Joan S. Brugge, a National Academy of Sciences member who studies signal transduction, left the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1992 to become scientific director of ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company she cofounded. "I felt that ARIAD was going to pursue research that was important to me, that my energy could be devoted to translating those discoveries into therapeutics, and that it would be a really worthwhile effort," she recalls. She also looked forward to reclaiming the energy that had been diverted by the various nonresearch duties of the academic scientist: lecturer, student adviser and multiple-committee member, for example. "I liked these responsibilities," she says. "But I wasn't able to control my time."

"Time for a change" is another motivating factor for many who make the switch. "Twenty years at Stanford was absolutely terrific, 10 years with Hughes was terrific, and another 20 years would have also been terrific,"says Scheller, "but I wanted new challenges." Goodman, who in the 1980s had the laboratory next door to Scheller's at Stanford, echoes his former neighbor. "Had I gone through my entire life just doing the same kind of basic research," he says, "I would have always wondered whether I had lost an opportunity. I thought that if I didn't do it, I was going to regret it."

Blurring the Lines Between Academia and Industry
Because Brugge took the industrial turn almost a decade ago, she has more data on the aftermath of her decision than do researchers who made this change more recently. Applying her research, ARIAD quickly identified three potential molecular targets against which therapies might be deployed. However, "we couldn't afford to continue to go after new targets because we needed to pursue the targets we'd already identified," Brugge says. "At the same time, in order to have capital to fund the pursuit, it was important for the company to form partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and get additional funding resources from investors."

Brugge thus found herself reliving the academic experience of being pulled away from her research efforts—this time to keep investments flowing. "I think that in one 18-month period, I gave 140 talks," she recalls. Brugge eventually decided to return to academia.

When she joined Harvard Medical School in 1997, she was pleasantly surprised to find that academia had started to emulate the research structure originally developed in industry—the collaborative, multidisciplinary research teams whose function is to funnel scientific discovery into the creation of drugs or vaccines. Similar academic groups now exist, or are being planned, for translational medicine. "So I have become much more involved in translational efforts than I ever was before," Brugge says. For example, she is now a committed member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, which describes itself as a "collaborative entity dedicated to the translation of research discovery into the eradication of cancer."

The creation of such campus facilities—other notable examples include the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering & Sciences at Stanford and the Health Sciences Initiative at Berkeley—may be academia's way of immunizing itself, keeping the trickle of researchers who leave for industry from becoming a stream. Or it may simply mark the natural evolution of the structure of campus biological research, a general response to changing environmental conditions.

"Industry and academia are different," says Goodman, "but they're still evolving. And the lines between them are getting more blurred. At Berkeley, we used to talk about how having the individual lab completely self-contained might not be the best model any more and how we needed to take a lesson from the private sector. The way things are often done in industry—core facilities with accessibility to different kinds of teams, and multidisciplinary approaches—was something that one needed to think about in the future design of academic laboratories. Look, for example, at what HHMI is doing with its new campus."

The blurring of the lines between academia and industry also reflects another new reality: The stigma once faced by biologists who took industrial positions seems to be disappearing, making it easier for them to consider taking the plunge. "There is still clearly a bias against scientists going into industry, but the acceptance is greater compared with 10 or 20 years ago," Chan says.

Kim agrees. "When I was in graduate school in the early '80s," Kim recalls, "you were not considered a success if you went into industry. Today we're finding that many of the really good students and postdocs are in fact attracted to, and being attracted by, opportunities in industry. There's also a shift in that you are seeing premier academic scientists moving into industry, and I think in many cases, it's driven by a desire to direct their science at solving unmet medical needs."

These are people who perceive new challenges as exciting rather than daunting and who want their work to improve the human condition. Where and how they do that work may ultimately be far less important than the fact that they do it.

Photos: (From top) Stanford University, Bob Boston, Barbara Ries, Kay Chernush, Courtesy of Joan Brugge Lab

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Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
March 2002, pages 22-25.
©2002 Howard Hughes Medical Institute