How to Grease the Academic-Industry Skids

Research finds that the U.S. innovation ecosystem has splintered since the 1970s, with corporate and academic science pulling apart and making application of basic scientific discoveries more difficult. The analysis also shows that Venture Capital (VC)-backed scientific entrepreneurship has helped to bridge this gap between corporate science and academia — but only in a couple of sectors. These findings suggest that if we want to see greater productivity growth, we need to explore alternative ways to translate science into invention.

There is no relationship between R/D spending and outcomes. Instead, when it comes to transferring from bench to bedside to boardroom, we need to rethink many parts of the value chain, including:

1. Rethinking bioscience graduate school education and MD/PhD programs.

2. Creating entrepreneurial medical schools and rethinking MD/MBA programs.

3. The role of AMC philantropreneurship.

4. Removing the obstacles to academic-industry collaboration and restoring trust.

5. Involving physicians earlier in the product development phase.

6. Creating new ways to fund and develop seed stage discoveries.

7. Changing the publish or perish culture.

8. Converging digital health with biopharma and techmed.

9. Appointing leaders who know how to lead innovators.

10. Teaching biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship to medical students, residents and fellows.

11. Reforming promotion and tenure criteria.

12. Creating more robust academic-industry knowledge exchange programs.

Simply put, academia has placed too many anti-entrepreneurial obstacles before faculties interested in getting discoveries to patients by working with industry partners. The industry has made it too hard for faculties to work with them. Regulators, by passing overly restrictive rules, have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. That creates lots of friction and too few deliverables at the bottom of the funnel that taxpayers are subsidizing. Those that do make it through the maze are increasingly unaffordable.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@ArlenMD.