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By Cynthia Manley / Illustration by Curtis Parker
The increasingly important marriage between the pharmaceutical industry and academic biomedical research can be a challenging one. Just as a real marriage brings together two sets of families and friends, habits and traditions, values and expectations, a marriage between industry and academia brings together different and sometimes conflicting missions, cultures and ways of doing business.
Instead of negotiating whose family will be visited at which holiday or how to discipline the children, the tricky issues revolve around rights to intellectual property, academic freedom and publishing results, the ability to work with other companies or other universities, and so on.
"We need each other," said Mace Rothenberg, M.D., director of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center's Phase I Drug Development Program. Rothenberg is a veteran of numerous successful interactions with industry partners, including the clinical trials that led to approval of oxaliplatin for colon cancer and gemcitabine for pancreas cancer.
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