Raised eyebrows. Strained smiles. Murmurs of reluctant congratulations.
These are just some of the responses I received from lab colleagues when I told them I was leaving academia for a commercially-driven career — or, less elegantly, “industry.”
In my world, when you say you’re going into pharma or joining a company, the reaction can be tribal. It’s the equivalent of going to the “dark side”. Academia is the noble path, while moving into industry means compromising that idealism for money, status or ego.
I trained as a geneticist and spent more than a decade as a cancer researcher, working on targeted therapies for aggressive breast and gastric cancers. I loved the work. I still miss the late nights tinkering in the lab, the thrill of an experiment finally behaving itself and the peculiar joy of being the only person in the world to know a particular test result exists.
But I also spent those years watching a dispiriting pattern repeat: brilliant ideas, compelling data and promising therapies that never made it past the lab door. Not because the science was bad, but because insufficient funding, translation challenges and misaligned incentives blocked the path to real-world impact.
The slow accumulation of frustrations reached a head when I spent two weeks shadowing clinicians on their rounds so we, as researchers, could better understand how our work translated into real care.
There was a patient, a 32-year-old Canadian woman, who was dying. She was lying there, on a hospital bed with tubes everywhere, completely calm. She told us she’d come to terms with death and that she was glad she travelled the world. She even joked that she was “ending on a high”, referencing the drugs she was on.
I was the same age as her, and that was the moment I realised I couldn’t stay in the lab. I needed to do something that would help science reach people faster.
So I left. First into public funding management, helping deploy government capital into research programmes across Imperial College and Imperial Healthcare NHS Trust. Then into venture capital and startup consulting, eventually joining a precision oncology startup, Concr, where I now serve as CEO. Each step brought me closer to what I actually cared about, making sure science reaches patients, not just the archives of a journal.
I didn't become a worse scientist
There’s a common assumption that leaving academia makes you a worse scientist, though I’d argue it can make you a sharper one. I can now speak both ‘lab’ and ‘boardroom’, and knowing what I know about how drugs get developed, how trials work and how money moves through the system, I ask much better questions.
I wish the route between academia and industry were more of a revolving door of people going out, learning how things work and coming back with better questions.
That’s the part of the conversation that gets lost. The “dark side” framing makes it sound like a one-way journey and a moral compromise. But the question shouldn’t be which path is more virtuous, but where can you do the most good given your skills and tolerance for ambiguity.
In academia, success is primarily measured by the number of papers you publish and citations you get. The feedback loops are long and indirect. You can build an entire career on elegant models of disease that never change a single clinical decision.
In a company, the link between money and impact is direct. If you’re building something nobody needs, you go bust. If you help patients in a way that matters, you earn the right to keep going. That pressure is uncomfortable, but it’s also why I chose it.
What’s often not talked about is that academia runs on money too, just more opaquely. Grants are money. Tenure is money and job security. Prestige is its own currency and intangible value (thanks, MBA). The difference is that in a company, nobody pretends otherwise, and that transparency can be liberating.
Generational shift gives me hope
What gives me real hope is a generational shift underway. Younger principal investigators who run labs nowadays increasingly get it. They want to work with industry to see their research applied. The stigma today often comes from the top, from department heads and senior consultants who block their juniors from getting involved in startups. But what I see is that the wall between academia and industry is already coming down.
There’s also a growing recognition that scientists don’t have to become founders or CEOs to be entrepreneurial. You can stay in academia and license your work; join a company as a scientific and clinical adviser; you can partner early with industry and get the scale that academia alone simply can’t provide. Entrepreneurship isn’t one thing, and the best scientific companies often have a researcher paired with someone from the business world who thinks differently than they do.
If we want more life-saving innovations to escape the lab, we need to retire the idea that one path is noble and the other is grubby. We need scientists who understand business, businesspeople who respect science and a system that lets people move between the two without being labelled a traitor.
