Biotech is ‘leading innovative science, not universities’

Pressure to win research grants and publish in top journals is holding back academic scientists from pursuing truly ground-breaking medical research, according to a Nobel laureate who says biotech companies are producing more era-changing innovation than universities.

Aside from a postdoctoral research post at the National Institutes of Health, Fred Ramsdell has spent his entire scientific career working in the US biotech sector, eventually winning the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology in October 2025 for his work on autoimmune diseases.

He shared the prize with his long-time collaborator Mary Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi, an investigator at Japan’s Science and Technology Agency in the 1990s who later moved to Osaka University.

Speaking to Times Higher Education at this month’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Ramsdell said he doubted whether his research would have advanced at the same pace if he undertaken research at a university.

“After my postdoc I ended up at a company called Immunex in Seattle, and I realised pretty quickly the scientists there were as good as any academic institution, but it was a team-oriented science,” he explained on the key difference with university-based research.

“I could work with biochemists, molecular biologists or protein structure people who were far better than I was at those things. I was a good cell biologist but other people had complementary skills, so I had this engine behind me,” he said on being a “cog in a wheel…of what was a really well-oiled machine.”

Asked if the same dynamic could be achieved at a leading research university, Ramsdell said: “No – and I think the answer today is still ‘Not really’.”

“Most people at universities do collaborate but they don’t operate as a team – they really don’t,” he argued.

“Most of my friends are academics and they’re fantastic scientists and great people, and do amazing work,” continued Ramsdell, explaining that “some of them are far smarter than I am”.

“But they don’t have the same structure [as in biotech companies], and they don’t all have a real common goal, other than to get funded. Our goal was to understand something enough that we could treat human disease, and that was really what we’re trying to do. We were a little more pointed in what we’re trying to do,” he said.

That situation was not isolated to Immunex, explained Ramsdell, stating that the vast majority of breakthroughs in his field in the 1990s came from biotech companies rather than academia.

“The mindset of most biotech companies today, including the one I helped found, is to take your technology and get it to the point where you can get something into people – that narrows the scope a lot. You’re trying to develop something that will be therapeutically useful and get to that point as quickly as possible.”

In contrast, many university-based principal investigators are forced to prioritise seeking funding to maintain their laboratories – a process also dependent on publishing in prestigious journals, said Ramsdell.

“The challenge for individual investigators is to get the resources [they need] but they are not really incentivised to take risks,” he said.

“They’re incentivised to get two Nature papers every year so they can get a new grant. But if you’re doing really risky stuff, you’re not getting two Nature papers every year…unless you’re ridiculously talented or ridiculously lucky,” argued Ramsdell, who claims that the “incentives aren’t quite there to take risks and to be incredibly innovative”.

Despite his faith in the biotech sector to spearhead innovation, Ramsdell noted its failings, not least the hard-nosed decisions taken by companies to close research teams whose work “doesn’t scale commercially” in the short term.

Ramsdell reflected how “my little company” Darwin, where he did his Nobel-winning work, was shut down after it was bought out by British biotech firm Chiroscience (later renamed Celltech) in 1996 despite encouraging results.

“They shut us down three or four years after we did the work that got the prize – they just closed our entire site,” he recalled. “They knew they could get rid of...$10 million [£7.5 million] a year by withdrawing one line on a spreadsheet, and that was us,” he said.

“It wasn’t that we weren’t productive or we weren’t any good. That was clearly not it. It was it was a financial decision so we all went looking for work,” he said.

That said, Ramsdell said he accepted the company’s decision, reflecting that the discovery was still 20 years away from transforming into a profitable drug.

Similarly, Ramsdell’s autoimmune disease research team at Novo Nordisk was also shut down shortly after he left the Danish company that is now best known for its GLP weight-loss jabs, which generated $12 billion in global sales last year.

“Novo was a great company to work for, very nice people. And I got to see the early data on the GLP tests, and we were all like, ‘Hell, that’s great data’, although I didn’t know what it meant financially,” he recalled.

“But six months after I left they closed down the entire autoimmunity division. They decided they don’t want to do autoimmunity anymore. Six years, they went from we’re going to do autoimmunity to ‘Nope, we’re not’. It just didn’t fit with the timelines and the business structure they wanted to have.”

“I knew we, as a lab on the other side of the world [in Seattle], were always vulnerable as we were so far away from the mother ship in Denmark,” he said, adding: “It was always going to be too easy to get rid of something when you don’t see what they’re doing every day.”

Another memorable firing occurred just after Ramsdell and his wife had secured a loan on a house they were building, he recalled. “So I had to go out and look for work again, but colleagues have had more brutal experiences,” he said.

“One friend was driving his family from Denver to Seattle for a new job when they rang him to say ‘Turn the car around – there’s no job”, he said.

Learning to embrace that uncertainty has been one of the main lessons of Ramsdell’s career, he said. “Regret and worry are worthless emotions because, when you think you’ve got everything under control, you’re probably wrong,” he said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com