Time to engage

Research collaborations between industry and academe have been a cornerstone of the biotech sector for years. But the prickly issues of agreeing who owns the intellectual property rights that come from the collaboration, how the background IP is handled, what right academics will have to publish, and the ever-present cultural divide means many relationships are not reaching their potential.

“Rather than overcoming the collaboration issues, companies do it at arm’s length. As a result there is a reluctance to commit mission critical research to collaborations. That needs to change,” Teri Melese, Director of Research Technologies at the University of California, San Francisco, told delegates yesterday at the BIO 2009 Convention in Atlanta.

There is a growing imperative for companies to access academic skills, and these interactions are no longer being seen as luxuries. But they must be mutually beneficial, and that means that the research interests of each partner have to be aligned.

“High impact collaborations require two way information flow,” noted Melese in a session, ‘Novel Industry-University Partnerships to Drive Innovation’. For a collaboration to be fruitful, the academics have to benefit from industrial expertise. It follows that it is important to jointly develop the research agenda, rather than a would-be partner company turning up with a shopping list.

In Melese’s view, it is better to leave discussions on intellectual property on one side until there is a compelling scientific proposition. “If you start by talking about IP, people think the deal can’t get done,” she said.

Master agreements are helping to streamline the process of initiating new programmes, and then additional projects can be added-on as work orders from the company, without setting out new agreements.

From the academic perspective, there must be explicit support from the top of the company to sustain the collaboration, and communication between the partners needs to go across multiple levels. These relationships are important, and they need to be systematically managed.

Melese called for more open strategies and hybrid models of collaboration. “We have to shift away from the idea of total ownership and adopt a new approach to information sharing, if we are going to address innovation gaps.”

In short, it is time to set out standard accords for the treatment of background IP, the conduct of research, publishing results, and so on, and fix dysfunctional relationships. Industry and academe need to work together seamlessly.