Testing the
Limits of Intimacy
Successful industry-academic alliances require give and take on both sides, the Government-Industry-Industry Research Roundtable reported after a "Roundtable Council" meeting in 2000 to explore issues in large-scale, long-term collaborations between industry and universities.
It requires companies to demonstrate faith in the unguided process of academic research, the Roundtable noted in a subsequent report entitled "Industry-University Research Partnerships: What Are the Limits of Intimacy?" And while some worry that universities are compromising their role of objective scholarship by getting too cozy with industry, still others believe that risk can be managed.
"I know the common misperception is that Big Pharma is big, bad and evil, but I believe that our goals are not that dissimilar and that we actually need each other to accomplish them," said Alan Sandler, M.D., director of Vanderbilt-Ingram's thoracic oncology program.
Sandler's successful interactions with industry include clinical research in partnership with Genentech involving its angiogenesis inhibitor bevacizumab. Results of studies done in collaboration with M.D. Anderson's Roy Herbst, M.D., Ph.D., showing its benefit in combination with erlotinib in advanced lung cancer, were reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
This work and a Sandler-led Eastern Cooperative Group study combining bevacizumab with chemotherapy helped lead to approval of the drug this fall for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
"The biggest change over the past 20 years is that the most important new drugs are no longer coming out of the government; they are coming out of pharmaceutical companies. Our mission is not to be one of 200
hospitals working on a clinical trial but to be a Comprehensive Cancer Center that develops cutting-edge, innovative clinical trials that can really move treatment forward in a big way. We can do that with industry, and our work with Genentech and M.D. Anderson is a classic example of how that can work."
Carlos Arteaga, M.D., science co-lead with Jennifer Pietenpol, Ph.D., on Vanderbilt-Ingram's new alliance with AstraZeneca, listed the key ingredients to a successful industry-academic alliance as "trust, speed and financial/scientific support."
"There has to be a willingness on both sides to go halfway; we've got to work quickly and the company has to provide real support for things to get done," he said. "And there has to be mutual need for a true partnership. The problems arise when it's unequal. I am convinced that our alliance with AstraZeneca will be successful because we (the company and the cancer center) are on equal footing. They need us as much as we need them."
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