David Lewis, director of Aerosol Research at healthcare company Chiesi examines the importance of building relationships between pharma and academia.
Relationship
Industry and academia have been working together for decades in the pharmaceutical sector, but historically relationships did not extend far beyond the traditional exchange of funding and research. For many years there has been a trend for partnerships to address mutual short-term goals, but more recent advice places emphasis on the importance of long-term strategic collaborations to establish trusting professional ties. By exploring the current challenges facing both industry and academia, and the potential advantages to both as a result of collaboration, key criteria for successful collaboration can be established and innovation into the future can be ensured.
Challenges for industry
Industry partners are driven to generate new, ground-breaking ideas which ultimately result in a marketable product or solution. Timing is critical: if a product or technology is too ahead of its time, it cannot be successfully implemented. Refining a hypothesis with the appropriate experiments is a lengthy process which requires a lot of work – often too long for the timelines of industry partners. Many industries have shifted their focus from investing in long-term, discovery-based R&D efforts towards shorter-term strategies that identify consumer needs and trends. In contrast to recent history, academic partners are now requesting more rights to intellectual property (IP), which can pose a challenge for companies which previously owned the IP.