Plenge Lab
Date posted: September 15, 2016 | Author: | No Comments »

Categories: Drug Discovery

The partnership between Academic-industry is one of my favorite topics. As someone who has spent most of his time in academics, and only recently joined industry (well, three years ago), I still feel as if I have a good perspective on both sides. I have written about my personal perspective about making the switch from academics into industry (blog post here), and I have referenced articles related to different perspectives on academics and industry (here, here).

A recent perspective in Cell Metabolism by Morris Birnbaum, Chief Scientific Officer of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases at Pfizer, adds important points to this conversation (links here, here). Specifically, Birnbaum discusses obstacles to relationships between academics and industry, and what can be done to make the relationships optimally productive.

[Disclaimer: I am a Merck/MSD employee. The opinions I am expressing are my own and do not necessarily represent the position of my employer.]

Birnbaum starts with an important premise:

Let’s start with something on which everyone agrees: the best hope for the development of novel therapeutics is through effective collaboration between the academic and private sectors, the latter including the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.” 

I certainly agree with this point, but not everyone does.…

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