Pharma and Academia: Finding New Ways to Join Hands for Mutual Benefit

As Big Pharmas seek to hedge their development risk and look for more externally sourced programs, partnerships with academic institutions are one of the many ingredients in the R&D secret sauce. Such deals aren't the academic-industry tie-ups of yore-where Big Pharma sought small money partnerships without giving a lot back to their academic partners. Business development execs view them as yet another way to access critically important innovation.