Industry and Academia - a blog post by ESR13 Martijn Bemelmans

In my previous blog post, I discussed some scientific insights I obtained during my time at the European RosettaCon, and in my first blog post, I broached the topic of industrial research compared to academic research. In this third and final blog post, I would like to bring both of these experiences together and share some insights that were presented at the European RosettaCon by a panel of academic and industry researchers regarding the differences of working in academia, “big pharma”, and startups.

One of the experts on the panel revealed how they felt that the main advantage of working in a big pharmaceutical company is that you can focus on a narrow field of your expertise. That is to say, they can be the head and main responsible for, for instance, computational design and work together with the head and main responsible for medicinal chemistry. This contrasts with their experience outside of the pharmaceutical industry, where they had to take leading roles in both computational design and medicinal chemistry. In their view, the opportunity to be part of a team working towards the same goal with multiple department heads is incredibly powerful.

The panel then went on to discuss how they experienced that small biotech companies can have only one method or target they work on. Consequently, if new information comes out about that target, the company may need to rapidly adapt to stay competitive. In big pharmaceutical companies, however, especially from a computational perspective, one typically works on several targets at the same time, and if new information comes out about one specific project, they can just decide to pause that project for weeks or years and put more focus on another project to stay competitive.
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Finally, the panel discussed the advantage of academic research in the ability to work on a specific topic of interest that does not need to have an immediate business impact. However, they then shared that it is also possible to do such work in industry. Indeed, companies can similarly apply for external grants to get a PhD or a postdoctoral researcher to work on a topic that does not necessarily have to align with the immediate corporate goals. In fact, this is exactly what happened in my situation, as J&J became a beneficiary in the ALLODD consortium to host me as a PhD student to work on simulation-based methods for cryptic pocket discovery. Of course, there are many other aspects to discuss when it comes to comparing academic and industry research, but I found the insights shared by this panel quite instructive and wanted to share them in this final post. One thing is for sure: whether in industry or academia, there is always interesting science to be done and exciting discoveries to be made. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog posts and take care!