August 18, 2017
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
After yesterday’s story of long-time University of California San Francisco (UCSF) scientist Shaun Coughlin defecting from academia to the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., there’s another similar story today. In this case, it’s Thomas Wynn, who after 26 years as a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is leaving to lead Pfizer’s inflammation and immunology unit.
A leading expert in immunology and fibrosis, Wynn is a Senior Investigator and Chief of the Immunopathogenesis Section of the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. The focus of his laboratory group is the immunological mechanisms of fibrosis.
Wynn is the recipient of several awards, including the Bailey K. Ashford Medal from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, the Oswaldo Cruz Medal from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, and two Merit Awards from the National Institutes of Health.
Talking to John Carroll, with Endpoints News, Wynn notes that over his 26 years at the NIH, the organization has shifted focus to work more directly with drug companies. As a result, over the years, he was involved in two active projects with Pfizer, which allowed him to see how they operated.
And now that he’ll be at Pfizer, he sees some changes already underway, which he plans to encourage. “We have a pretty big portfolio of early things we’re looking at,” he told Carroll. Some of that is to merge discovery, preclinical and clinical operations and develop better models for early target evaluation. Fibrosis is one area, but other specialties include atopic dermatitis, psoriasis, ulcerative colitis and lupus.
Carroll writes, “Wynn says he’s excited about making the migration into Big Pharma circles, something we’ve been seeing a lot of as academic and government scientists are drawn into the big research hubs where the largest R&D operations have been concentrating their forces. There have been multiple examples of that, with plenty more to come, as top investigators are recruited throughout biopharma. Wynn’s particularly happy about moving into Cambridge, Mass., with a lab in the pharma giant’s new Kendall Square digs.”
Although one would think there would be plenty of researchers at NIH to collaborate with, Wynn notes that one of the things he’s looking forward to is the variety of investigators at Pfizer and throughout the hub.
“That’s my major motivation for coming here; doing collaborations in drug development,” Wynn told Carroll. “I can do it at a much higher level. At Pfizer, there are experts in all these areas. As a basic scientist, I have lots of great ideas, I may have 20 great ideas. With the experts here, I can have meetings and say, of those 20, which are the best? Which targets can I develop a small molecule with?”
Although there is a steady change of executives at top biopharma companies, the shift from academia to industry and government to industry is a more recent trend, or academia to government. Examples include Jay Bradner leaving Dana-Farber to go to the NIBR two years ago, and Jean-Charles Soria leaving South-Paris University to head the oncology innovative medicines group at AstraZeneca (AZN) .
Another trend, maybe bigger than both, is the exodus of top academic and industry scientists to tech companies that are making forays into life science. Examples include Thomas Insel, formerly the director of the National Institute of Mental Health joining Google’s Verily Life Sciences, and Jessica Mega, formerly at Harvard Medical School, also joining Verily as its chief medical officer.
