I attended an event this week at the Royal Society,
The Lambert Review 10 years on,
which discussed
how universities and businesses could work better together. It was very relevant to us here at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, as firstly, although we are an independent research institution we are also a college of the University of London which gives us university status, and secondly because we are unusually active at working in partnership with industry.
The 2003 Lambert Review looked at
ways that universities, businesses and Government could work together in research and development partnerships, and with research playing an important role in the Government’s plan for economic recovery, this topic is as important as ever. This week’s event looked at how the landscape has changed over the last decade, what challenges remain and what future opportunities there are. A prestigious panel spanning a range of sectors was chaired by Sir Paul Nurse
, President of the Royal Society and a Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher.
Sir Richard Lambert, who led the review, started the discussion with a summary of how things had changed over the last decade. He felt that in a push-pull model from universities to business, universities had increased the ‘push’ of their research, but that businesses still had a way to go to increase their ‘pull’ for collaborations. He highlighted the need for longer-term Government policies to give business a feeling of security in their collaborative strategies.
Next, Professor Julia Buckingham, Vice-Chancellor of Brunel University, gave a university’s perspective on the debate, arguing that the image of industry funding within universities had become more positive, and describing the activities that Brunel had established to strengthen collaborations and embed business engagement. Her message was clear: the university sector is open for business.
The final speaker, David Willetts MP
, Minister for Universities and Science, spoke about the UK’s financial landscape and the different personalities of the commercial models in different countries. He highlighted the UK’s strengths in taking leaps in innovation, and said that we need to play to our advantages.
At The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), we like to think we do just that, as a means of making sure that our results deliver real benefits for cancer patients. We work very closely with a range of pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical equipment companies to translate our work into products and services for cancer patients and their care-givers.
We also work very hard to circumvent two potential barriers that the university sector in general faces in interacting with industry. Firstly, there is a risk that pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and investors are too cautious to invest in early stage academic research, at least in part because of the downturn in the global economy. At the ICR, to mitigate this risk we are developing technologies further in house, taking them to a less risky stage to make them more attractive to industrial partners and investors.
A second potential barrier is that academics do not see knowledge exchange between academic and industry as being central to their role. Here at the ICR we have strong buy-in and support for business partnerships from our Chief Executive, Professor Alan Ashworth, and Deputy Chief Executive, Professor Paul Workman, who encourage our scientists to put translating our discoveries into healthcare at the heart of what we do here. Our Enterprise Team also provides tremendous support for collaborations.
And we’ve been very successful here at the ICR at exploiting our research to bring cancer treatments to patients more quickly. We have a number of major collaborations on drug discovery and development with international partners such as AstraZeneca and Merck-Serono, as well as licensing novel technologies for use in radiotherapy treatment through partnerships with companies like Elekta. Most excitingly, we have seen the ICR’s prostate cancer drug,
abiraterone, licensed to Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies and enter the clinic under the trade name Zytiga.
Business and universities have together made great strides over the last decade, and success stories here at the ICR such as abiraterone wouldn’t be possible without this sort of working model. I’m looking forward to the next decade bringing even more success.
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