With its top academic institutions, Boston has long been a Mecca for biotechnology companies. But the demand for more academic input into industrial science is luring top drug companies there too.
Corie Lok
A three-year-old, ten-storey modern glass building housing two of Harvard Medical School’s basic research departments and several clinical program sits on the school’s Boston campus. Its near-twin, a two-year-old, eleven-storey glass building housing Merck Research Laboratories stands next door.
Merck didn’t set out to copy Harvard’s neighboring building, but it is fitting that the two buildings look similar. Merck’s Boston laboratories are trying not just to be closer to Harvard, but also to be more like Harvard. That means recruiting scientists from Harvard and other nearby institutions and collaborating more with local academic and biotech researchers. “Boston–Cambridge is ideal because of the density of outstanding institutions,” says Lex Van der Ploeg, the head of Merck’s Boston labs.
Merck is one of several pharmaceutical companies that have realized Boston is the place to be. Indeed, more funding from the National Institutes of Health goes to Boston and Cambridge-based institutions (more than $1.5 billion in 2004) than to those in any other U.S. city. And Boston–Cambridge can boast perhaps the largest concentration of biotech companies of any U.S. urban centre.
The drug companies hope that being close to so many potential academic and biotech collaborators will help them reinvigorate drug development. “It’s no longer sufficient to be based in New Jersey to negotiate deals,” says Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, also in Boston. The pursuit of new ideas and technologies from academia and biotech has gotten so competitive that drug companies “literally have to be in the same city to get early access to those assets.”
Pharmaceutical companies have not been shy about moving next door to the universities. In 2002, Novartis moved its research headquarters from Basel, Switzerland, to Cambridge. One of its two buildings is across the street from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Pfizer Research Technology Center, which opened in 1999, is located just off the westernmost tip of the MIT campus. Wyeth Research has a site three subway stops away from Harvard University. In Cambridge, academic and industry collaborators can easily take a 15-minute stroll (or less) to meet up and talk science.
The arrival of the pharmaceutical research centers has opened up new job opportunities for scientists in Boston. “It’s been very positive having them here,” says Una Ryan, chair of the Massachusetts Biotech Council. “There’s a sense that you’ll have something to rely on if the first ten jobs don’t work out.”
Although there was some initial fear in the community that smaller companies and even academic institutions wouldn’t be able to attract workers lured away by the drug industry’s high salaries, that fear for the most part has waned, says Ryan. In fact, the presence of the big drug companies can help enrich the skills of scientists in Boston and could even draw more scientists to the Boston area, says David Altshuler, director of the medical and population genetics program at the Broad Institute.
“One of the best job-training program that we’ve had at the Broad Institute is the local biotech and pharmaceutical industry,” says Altshuler. He cites examples of people who used to work at Massachusetts General Hospital (where he is also based) or the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (a precursor to the Broad Institute), but then moved to industry. After they’d gained new technical or management skills, they were hired back by the Broad for those new skills. “We recruit from companies as much as companies come and try to recruit from us,” says Altshuler.
Hiring sprees
Still, competition for top scientists can be intense. Recruitment advertisements from companies such as Merck and Novartis are routinely found on the subway trains and stations that serve MIT and Harvard. Wyeth’s Cambridge site reported an increase in turnover among its scientists last year, which was probably due to their competitors moving in and embarking on hiring sprees. Recruiting talent has been especially challenging for smaller, lesser-known firms such as Organon, a Dutch drug company that opened a research center last year a few blocks away from MIT. “There’s a lot of competition but the pool is large,” says Wiebe Olijve, who heads Organon’s Cambridge center.
Whereas most pharmaceutical companies established their presence in Boston–Cambridge by adding a Boston research center to their list of sites around the world, Novartis went a step further by placing its research leadership in Cambridge. Like Merck, Novartis is trying to emulate its academic and biotech neighbors. To head the new Cambridge enterprise, it hired a Boston academic, Mark Fishman, who was the chief of cardiology and director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital before joining Novartis. Four of its 16 scientific leaders were recruited directly from Harvard or its affiliated research hospitals.
Since early 2003, Novartis’s Cambridge labs have hired about 1,000 people; most are from the Boston area and many had fewer than five years of industry experience. To drive its local recruitment, the company goes to more than 20 local career fairs each year, even ones at smaller colleges, says Terry Gallagher, Novartis’s head of staffing in Cambridge. “We want to be entrenched in the community,” says Gallagher.
Merck’s Boston labs opened in 2004. The labs employ about 200 scientists, and there are plans to hire 50 more this year and 100 more employees next year. Van der Ploeg says his research budget and recruitment plans weren’t affected by the cutbacks at other Merck sites, which resulted in the layoffs of 7,000 workers worldwide last year. Nor has the research or recruitment at Boston been affected by the thousands of pending lawsuits surrounding the withdrawal of its painkiller Vioxx, he says.
To help fuel its recruitment efforts, Merck has taken advantage of its proximity to academic centers. For example, Nancy Kohl, senior director of cancer biology and therapeutics, says she has had dozens of young, local academic scientists walk over to the Merck building to chat informally with her and others about what it’s like to work there before deciding whether to apply for a position. Kohl got to know many of these scientists initially through research collaborations. Of the 13 recently hired PhDs in her department, four were from the Boston area, either from academia or from biotech companies.
Proximity helps
In addition to recruiting, pharmaceutical companies have come to Boston to establish ties with the local academic and biotech community. For example, Merck’s Boston labs, unlike the company’s other research sites, holds career fairs, symposia and seminars that are open to local academic scientists. They also host open-house days for students, and events for investors. The company has begun more than ten new collaborations with local academic groups and companies since opening the Boston labs.
Not long after moving to Cambridge, Novartis announced a collaboration with the Broad Institute to uncover the genetic roots of type 2 diabetes. The team is close to releasing its first set of results on the web, which will be freely available to scientists. Being so close together means team members from both organizations can meet weekly, says Altshuler, who is one of the principal investigators on the project. But the proximity doesn’t just enable more frequent meetings, he says. “You end up with a different nature of relationship.” There’s a sense of a higher level of commitment to making the collaborations work, since it’s in everyone’s long-term interest to maintain good neighborly relations, says Altshuler.
And these kinds of collaborations with industry can open doors to young academic scientists. Wyeth Research in Cambridge hired Robert Martinez in 2001 as a staff scientist after he had spent four years as a postdoc at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Martinez started his postdoc intending to pursue a career in academia, largely because it was the only career option he really knew.
But being in Boston, he got exposure to industry research. Although Martinez didn’t collaborate directly with industry as part of his postdoctoral work, he was invited by his principal investigator, cancer researcher Todd Golub, to attend meetings with local companies that other members of the lab were working with. “It opened my eyes,” says Martinez.
Now at Wyeth, Martinez says he still attends seminars at academic institutions like the Whitehead Institute and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He has even had bioinformatics experts from the Broad Institute come to train him and his colleagues on software the Broad has developed and made freely available.
Originally from the Caribbean, Martinez had once thought that he would work in California or Hawaii for the warm weather, but doesn’t seem to regret his choice of climate. “I wanted to go to a place that would foster the advancement of my career,” says Martinez. “Boston is certainly a place to do that.”
Reprinted from Naturejobs