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.
