About 100 representatives from leading universities and technology firms converged on campus Tuesday night to discuss enhancing American industrial competitiveness through research collaboration between academia and industry.
At the welcome dinner held at the Washington Duke Inn, which kicked off a three-day conference, advocates of industry-university partnerships emphasized that both parties have much to offer. The chief incentive on both sides for such collaborations are declining revenues and greater competition in the global economy.
For the Medical Center, decreasing federal support and clinical revenues threaten its commitment to research and teaching. "We're in a time of great crisis because the funds for our mission are drying up," said keynote speaker Dr. Ralph Snyderman, University chancellor for health affairs and dean of the School of Medicine. "We need to be far more business-like in the future without sacrificing our mission."
To this end, Snyderman said that universities should encourage their faculty to think about goals for the commercialization of their research. With their supply of fresh ideas, skilled manpower, and patient volunteers and safety models for clinical testing, academic medical centers can be a cost-effective partner in research ventures with biotechnology firms.
"We believe that as industry examines itself and looks to be cost-effective and downsize, they might see [an advantage to] using universities for special [projects]," Snyderman said.
In turn, the biotechnology industry can provide ideas for new products, cutting-edge technologies for carrying out research and flexible opportunities for research development, training and funding.
"[Commercialization] is good for the public; that's what the Congress wants; it's certainly good for industry and it's good for the University," Snyderman said. "If [universities] don't satisfy the needs of the public... we're going to get smaller or we may not even be there [in the future]."
The University has been a prominent leader in establishing partnerships with industry. In June, the Medical Center and ExVivo Therapies, Inc., a California-based biotechnology company, announced plans to construct the first cell processing center on the East Coast. The center is designed to grow and modify human cells for therapeutic purposes.
One of the barriers to collaboration between academia and industry in the past has been a fundamental "ivory-tower" attitude among faculty. Bill Gear, president of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., a former professor and the other keynote speaker, said that the emphasis on "curiosity-driven," specialized research--while highly successful--has created a generation of scientists who do not necessarily believe that their research should be oriented toward social problems.
Gear also said that the scientific community has become too focused on generating new discoveries and has let the application of such discoveries to society lag. "In our concern to protect the nature of research, we have failed to communicate to the world at large--that world that funds us--that we are working on their problems," he said.
Chris Scott, associate director of Stanford's Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine and director of corporate affairs for its medical center, agreed with Gear's analysis. "We have to realize that good basic research can be done with an end goal in mind, and that there's nothing shameful in that," Scott said. "We've got to come down out of our ivory towers."
In addition to enhancing competition through collaboration, an important purpose of university-industry partnerships is to expose young minds to career opportunities outside of academia. "As the academic institution shrinks, we have to find new jobs for our students," Scott said. "The industrial sector will be a good place for them to pursue their careers."
Dr. Steve Putman, senior vice president for research administration and policy at Duke, agreed. "Maybe the issue is not that we're training too many PhDs. Maybe it's the fact that we're trying to attract [all of them] to academia," he said.
Conference participants will break up into small discussion groups today and tomorrow to address current barriers to university and industrial collaborations. The conference is jointly sponsored by the Industrial Research Institute, the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable, and the Council on Competitiveness.
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