We cannot cure what we do not yet understand

THE public often imagines university scientists working tirelessly in big laboratories, free to pursue life-saving cures. The reality of modern academia could not be more different.

Today, researchers are caught in an exhausting institutional trap that prioritises rapid commercial products over deep biological understanding.

Across universities, the pressure to survive is relentless. Beyond heavy teaching and administrative loads, academics are judged by rigid annual performance evaluations, aggressive publication quotas and how much industry money they can bring in. Funding bodies now evaluate scientific proposals heavily on immediate commercialisation and near-term spin-offs.

Scientists proposing to study how a brain cell fundamentally functions without promising a marketable product or patent within a tight two-to-three-year grant cycle routinely face rejection. They are being forced to act like short-term entrepreneurs rather than discoverers, mandating them to translate science into medicine before they fully understand the biology.

Consider the global challenge of Alzheimer’s disease. For decades, billions of dollars were poured into late-stage drug trials that ultimately failed because we tried to fix a complex biological machine before fully mapping its wiring.

Our most promising breakthroughs in neurodegenerative disease did not begin with a race to build a commercial pill. They began with fundamental, curiosity-driven studies, asking how proteins fold inside a cell, why toxic plaques accumulate, and how the brain’s immune system clears microscopic debris.

History repeatedly shows that this is how transformative medicine is born. Nearly every Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, from the discovery of microRNA in tiny roundworms to the foundational mechanics behind the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, took decades of patient, unglamorous laboratory work before it was ready for the clinic.

Today, while tools like CRISPR gene-editing give us the ability to intervene in genetic diseases, it is fundamental research that gives us the wisdom to intervene safely.

If society wants real cures for devastating diseases, funding agencies, universities and policymakers must look beyond instant commercial returns and give scientists the breathing room and long-term support required to do real foundational science.

ASSOC PROF DR FAZLEEN HASLINDA MOHD HATTA

Department of Pharmacology and Life Sciences

Faculty of Pharmacy

Universiti Teknologi MARA