Lee Rubin of Harvard says opportunities are growing to return to academia after working in drug development.
Alexandra Goho
Neuroscientist Lee Rubin has moved back and forth between academia and industry several times over the course of his career. His experience in both arenas helps him bridge the gap between basic research and drug development in his new position as director of translational medicine at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. It also shows how a biologist isn’t necessarily bound to choose between academia and industry.
Rubin began his career as a professor of neuroscience and biophysics at Rockefeller University. While there, a friend who was the chief scientific officer at Athena Neurosciences (now Elan Pharmaceuticals) recruited Rubin to lead the company’s research on the blood-brain barrier in the search for a treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS). “I had never considered working for a biotech company before,” he says. “But it just so happened that I had taken a course at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and I knew how to grow cells that form tight junctions and characterize them,” he says.
Such knowledge turned out to be useful in understanding cell-to-cell interactions in the brain. He exploited this knowledge at Athena to develop an antibody that would prevent MS-causing immune cells from migrating into the brain. That work ultimately led to the development of the drug Tysabri.
After three years with Athena, he moved to London in 1990 to become a professor at University College London. Putting his industry experience to good use, he directed a research institute for neurodegenerative disease that was funded by a Japanese pharmaceutical company. “It was a combination of academia and big pharma,” says Rubin.
In 1998, he joined the Cambridge, MA-based biotech firm Ontogeny (now Curis), developing drugs for cancer and neurodegenerative disease. He was excited about Ontogeny’s work in developmental biology and the prospect of working with Doug Melton, the company’s founder (now codirector of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute). After the company merged with Curis, Rubin conceived of the idea of using embryonic stem cells for drug screening—the core of his current work (see related story on NNB about Rubin’s work at Harvard).
When Curis discontinued Rubin’s screening effort, Rubin moved the project to the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in July of this year. Curis’s decision, says Rubin, reflects a general trend of biotech companies moving away from risky projects. “If you define biotech as the intermediate between university research and pharmaceutical companies, that intermediate no longer exists in the way that it once existed,” he says.
As an increasing number of universities such as Harvard begin to fill the void left by biotech, Rubin says, there will be more opportunities for researchers in industry to move back into academia. He advises young scientists to leave the door open by, for instance, taking industry positions that allow for academic activities, such as publishing in scientific journals. “Preserve as much flexibility as possible,” he says.
Related story: In pursuit of a dream drug screen. Harvard’s Lee Rubin says the near-term promise of embryonic stem cells will be realized in drug screening rather than in therapeutics.