During his nine years working in the pharmaceutical industry, Michael Pollastri learned to protect his research and data with extreme caution. “In the drug industry, everything is super secret,” said Pollastri, now an associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern. “It’s the culture.”
But Pollastri said this secrecy model doesn’t work when it comes to curing infectious diseases such as African sleeping sickness and Chagas disease, which affect the poorest members of the global community but are largely “neglected” by the industry. What’s more, “there’s not enough money going around to spend time on projects in which no one is sharing information,” Pollastri said.
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