More than 500 young life sciences entrepreneurs arrived on one of the Boston Harbor islands this week. While they were there for the annual Nucleate Alumni Summit conference, the vibe was a cross between a summer camp for geniuses and an episode of the reality show "Survivor."
Around a beach bonfire, attendees talked about their efforts to get cancer medicines to tumors, while triggering fewer side effects. But they also worried that not everyone would make it through a challenging period in the life sciences industry.
There were concerns about the dearth of money available from venture capital investors and federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health, shrinking research labs at universities and securing visas to stay in the country after earning advanced degrees here.
Nucleate is a Boston-based nonprofit organization, with chapters around the world, that aims to support students in science who want to start companies or find jobs in the life sciences industry. Here are five things people were talking about at its summit this week, held on Cathleen Stone Island (the former Thompson Island).
Boston's position as a global hub is at risk
Attendees talked about the rise of China as both a source of potential medicines that could be marketed in the U.S., and as a rival to the life sciences industry here.
Oliver Dodd, the executive director of Nucleate, said that he'd been impressed by Canada's drive to grow its industry — and others said that some university researchers who might've come to the U.S. a year ago are now opting to stay there to conduct their experiments, because of funding cuts and visa anxieties.
A group of Texans at the event mentioned a proposed $3 billion funding initiative in their state to support research related to dementia. (It still requires the approval of voters this November.)
Massachusetts is experiencing "a contracting moment" for the life sciences industry, with potentially "very many lost opportunities" related to promising new research that could become medicines, Michal Preminger, a former Johnson & Johnson executive, said.
"In the spirit of optimism, I still think that Massachusetts is the best place to do the next thing that is important to do," she said.
But as an American, Preminger said it would be a plus for the country if other states can continue marching forward: "It's okay if innovation comes from Texas, not from Massachusetts. Sorry for betraying my adopted home state."
Travis McCready, an executive at the real estate firm JLL, said that he thought some of the cities with more established life sciences clusters would weather the current storm.
"In times of confusion, people retreat to what they know — places like Boston, San Diego and San Francisco," he said.
But even McCready acknowledged that places like Australia, Saudi Arabia and London were hustling to attract more employment and investment from biotech and pharma companies. (Life sciences is an umbrella term that covers those industries and others, such as medical devices and diagnostic tests.)
Some companies are still finding funding
Many attendees described an engine of company creation in life sciences that wasn't functioning the same way it had a year or two ago.
Typically, research done at universities, and often funded by the government, would be licensed to a startup company that aimed to create a new treatment with it.
Venture capital firms would put money into the company, hoping to take it public and get a financial return. Those public companies would continue collecting additional money to shepherd their treatment through the Food and Drug Administration's clinical trials process — all the while adding employees and renting lab space.
But in 2025, some of those academic research labs are seeing their staffing cut by as much as 70%, and empty lab space is piling up in the Greater Boston area. The real estate firm Newmark estimates that more than one-third of lab space is currently vacant, and more is still being built.
Still, some entrepreneurs at the event said they'd recently been able to get funding for their companies.
One, Michael Schrader of Elastro, said he is developing a new kind of brain implant to monitor epileptic seizures, and ideally interrupt them. Another, Stephen Linderman of Absco Therapeutics, is developing a new treatment for cervical cancer.
Linderman said he'd entered 2025 hoping to raise $30 million for the company, but had dialed back his expectations to $15 million because of the tough funding environment. Some of the funding Linderman had managed to raise for the company — about $300,000 — came from a National Science Foundation grant program for small businesses, and he said he hoped a $400,000 National Institutes of Health grant would soon be approved.
Drug prices are high — and no one has a solution for that
The lofty price for many new medicines, and the unwillingness of insurers to pay for them, wasn't explicitly a topic at the summit, but it was part of conversations over dinner.
No one in the industry wants the Trump administration to introduce pricing limits on the drug industry, which they believe would stifle innovation and reduce America's competitiveness. But the industry also doesn't have good solutions for affordability, aside from "wait until our drugs go generic, and then they're less expensive."
One example: some of Novo Nordisk's patents on its weight loss drugs could last until the early 2030s. That's not great news for people facing an imminent loss of insurance coverage.
The role of AI in drug development will grow
One of the speakers was Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, chief scientific officer at the pharma company Novo Nordisk in Denmark, who helped develop a new class of weight loss drugs now sold under brand names like Wegovy and Ozempic. While today about 10% of the lab work in pharmaceutical research and development is done by AI, and 90% by humans, Knudsen predicted that "in ten years, it's probably going to be the opposite."
"We just need the machines to do the work that we cannot comprehend, because our brains are not big enough, but we still need to be the ones who set up [experiments], and conclude, and take it on from there," she said.
Knudsen doesn't expect AI to replace human workers, but rather allow companies "to do more with the same human resources."
Everybody wants to cure the world
While the life sciences industry does occasionally create new billionaires — as it did during the COVID pandemic with vaccine-makers like Moderna — it's populated mainly by scientists in search of new ways to cure diseases. And similar to "Survivor" contestants navigating a devious obstacle course, they've got to overcome lots of hurdles on the way from a first promising experiment to something that doctors can prescribe.
Dodd, the executive director of Nucleate, said he was attracted to life sciences "to help patients living with an unmet medical need." He grew up in Needham with one of them — his younger sister, who was fighting pediatric cancer.
How's she doing today?
"She's now a nurse, and she works at Boston Children's Hospital" — the same hospital where she was treated, he said. "It's a pretty nice full circle moment,"
She planned to attend the Nucleate conference on Tuesday, he said.
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