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The evolution of industry-academia relationships in pharma

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David Lewis, director of Aerosol Research at healthcare company Chiesi examines the importance of building relationships between pharma and academia. 

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.

Barriers in academia

The main driving force for academic institutions to partner with industry is access to funding. However, in the current funding climate, pools of money are drying up faster as pharmaceutical companies are cutting their R&D budgets, which drives up competition and limits the number of collaborations that industry partners are willing to enter into. The challenge for academic institutions is to leverage their assets to secure funding, but also to deliver return on investment in a tight economic situation. 

Industry partners are particularly focused on deliverables and timelines, which can often challenge universities that rely on boards, rather than a few individuals, to make decisions. Academics constantly need to prove that their projects have deliverables to bolster their history of successful research, but aligning this with industry-focused timelines can be difficult. 

Bridging the divide

The main benefits to academic institutions for overcoming these challenges to collaboration include: 

There are also many advantages for industrial partners. Aside from access to the commercial value of innovations coming from research institutes, companies will also often have discrete access to high calibre academics finishing their studies or research posts, looking to start their career in industry. Access to these bright minds is highly valuable to companies, not simply for their contributing intellect, but for the personal ties with the university they bring with them. Cultivating such ties with key individuals over time will enable companies to bridge the cultural divide between academia successfully. Businesses, through their partnerships, may also get access to cutting-edge research equipment. Universities can apply for grants to purchase the most sophisticated instrumentation, which is often integral to the success of their research. Pharmaceutical companies may not direct their funds to such equipment, or even have the capacity to house it, so connections with universities that dedicate their resources to this is advantageous. 

Successful pharmaceutical partnerships

In order to evaluate the best approach to a new collaboration, it is useful to consider examples of existing successful partnerships in the pharmaceutical industry. Chiesi opened its research and development centre in Chippenham, UK, in 2009 and partners with multiple universities worldwide. As part of these collaborations, Chiesi supports PhD and Masters students, and the universities provide access to specialist knowledge to advance their combined inhaled drug delivery research goals. 

In partnership with the University of Bristol and the University of Hertfordshire, Chiesi and the University of Alberta investigate the behaviour of aerosol particles in the humid lung environment. When a patient inhales a drug from an inhaler device, the drug particle changes shape and behaviour upon entering the respiratory tract. Accurately measuring these changes is an ongoing challenge for university research groups and pharmaceutical companies, but Institutions such as Alberta have a wealth of expertise in particle microphysics, and are therefore incredibly valuable research partners. 

A recent paper published by this collaborative group describes how aerosol particles respond to changes in their surrounding environmental conditions, by growing in size due to the atmospheric moisture of the lung. They found that the initial size of the particle affects how it responds to moisture, and therefore how deposition in the lung is affected. This understanding can be used to select the composition of aerosol particles in an inhaler, and therefore control particle growth and enhance dissolution. The group aims to develop this, by further understanding microphysical processes, including the rapid processes that occur when propellant and co-solvent evaporate from droplets generated by a metered dose inhaler (MDI). The processes occurring in particle production (e.g. spray drying) could also provide further routes to control aerosol dynamics and tailor particle response upon inhalation.

Continuing collaboration

The drive to transfer knowledge and innovation from academia to industry is increasingly fierce, but funding restrictions and ongoing miscommunications between the two sides can hamper these attempts. Universities will have to provide strong leaders with an understanding of business to negotiate such collaborations, and an environment of mutual accountability must be nurtured. Political and economic challenges are likely to influence the future of such partnerships, due to funding constraints and the role of the government in facilitating collaborations that are viable over the long-term. One of the biggest challenges to academics is finding the right, trustworthy partner to commercialise a technology which may have been in development for decades. A mutual appreciation for the value of an innovation between industry and academic partners in pharma is needed.

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