Giovanni Fucà, Medical Director, Early Global Development, Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“One year ago I crossed the (in)visible line from academia to industry.
- It didn’t feel like changing jobs.
- It felt like stepping behind the curtain.
Seeing research from the other side changes your mental models. Some myths fall apart quickly. Others take time. But what becomes clear is this: the intent is real, and the scale is different.
If academia teaches you depth, industry teaches you amplitude.
In the past 12 months I’ve had the privilege of being immersed in an early oncology portfolio so vast that, at times, it genuinely feels like a playground for scientific curiosity. Different modalities, different mechanisms, different bets on the future of cancer medicine, all unfolding at once.
And this transition happened in a very particular moment.
The year AI stopped being a promise and became infrastructure.
Being exposed to this shift from the inside (across research, development, decision-making, and collaboration) has been one of the most intellectually intense experiences of my career.
But what surprised me the most wasn’t the technology.
It was the people.
Mentors who are generous with their thinking. Teams that are truly multifunctional, not in slides, but in daily reality. Spaces where differences are not something to fear, but something that compounds value.
Working this way forces you to rewire how you see expertise. You learn that progress rarely comes from individual brilliance, and much more often from well-aligned minds moving in the same direction.
And maybe that’s the biggest shift.
- From ownership to orchestration.
- From individual contribution to something built together.
One year in, I can say this with clarity: I would make this choice again, a thousand times over.
- Not because one world is better than the other.
- But because seeing both expands how you understand what it really takes to move science forward.
And if you care about impact, that perspective is a privilege.”
Other articles featuring Giovanni Fucà on OncoDaily.