Last December, I attended the American Society of Cell Biology’s national meeting in New Orleans. The conference was attended by thousands of scientists. It stretched out into packed conference rooms and airplane hangar-like exhibition halls, filled with rows of science posters and biotech vendors who lured visitors by hawking convention tchotchkes such as T-shirts, pens and tote bags.
At the American Society of Hematology conference at Atlanta in 2012, vendors and scientists were separated by a large partition, but there were greater incentives to cross the border. They had hand sanitizers, lens cleaners, strong espresso drinks and gourmet delicacies, including strawberries dipped in chocolate, cheesecake, frozen yogurt and French crepes. The lavishness struck me as absurd. Interactions between the companies and the conference attendees raised potential ethical dilemmas. After accepting knickknacks from and building professional relationships with pharmaceutical companies, attending physicians would be predisposed to prescribe some of these companies’ products to their patients.
In theory, separating medical research and companies would seem proper. However, the truth is that both utilitarian ends and proprietary considerations have increasingly blurred the relationship between research, medical practice and major companies.
Conflicts of interest are inevitable with the intersection of federal research agencies, academia and biotechnology companies, since individual players will always have different motivations. In 1980, the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act enabled universities, private businesses and non-profit organizations to retain ownership of inventions generated by a federal agency’s research funding. While this has helped biotech companies attract investment capital and accelerated the commercialization of federally-funded inventions, improper proprietary patents may stifle research progress.
Yet this concern should not prevent future collaborations between biotechnology and academia, since the boundary between industry and academia is already beginning to fade. Instead, biotechnology companies like Genentech encourage their scientists to devote part of their time to side projects and publish their results for the scientific community. Meanwhile, universities have been placing patents and products on their scientists’ products for decades. Dartmouth professors have embarked on starting their own startups, such as GlycoFi, Inc., founded by professors Tillman Gerngross and Charles Hutchinson in 2000.
As a result, the best course of action for all parties involved would be to remove the partition between biotechnology companies, government research institutions and research universities so that as much collaboration as possible occurs. Many fields could benefit from such a move. Take the example of personalized medicine. This collaboration currently exists only in disconnected components and is hampered by limited funding and logistical issues. The advent of the Human Genome Project fueled hopeful projections, leading to genome-wide studies that connect genetic variations with physical traits. Enterprising new startups have embraced the spirit of personalization through the development of personalized diagnosis, which may become a more commonly utilized medical diagnostics tool after its acceptance by the Food and Drug Administration. Scientific development, medical translation, health delivery and health policy must effectively come together to further advance biology and its application to our lives.
