At a time when federal research dollars have grown scarcer, universities are embracing industry partners interested in getting a first crack at their cutting-edge technologies.

The latest evidence of this comes from a recently announced agreement between Harvard Medical School and the pharmaceutical giant Merck. Merck and Harvard Medical School will collaborate to advance research programs in oncology and central nervous system disorders. Merck's decision to open a research facility just down the road from Harvard in 2004 put researchers at both institutions in walking distance of each other.

For Merck, the deal gives the company an early look at new discoveries and the right to negotiate licensing deals for technology that emerges from the collaboration before anyone else. For Harvard, the agreement provides not only funding, but a chance for researchers concerned about seeing their work commercialized an opportunity to interact with a major drug company. It also provides an avenue to advance their projects at a time when capital for early-stage development to carry potential products to a point they can garner private investment is hard to come by.

But for critics of the fading lines between academia and industry, it is another sign of a troubling trend that they say is changing academic research for the worse.

"The question is, do we want our universities to focus on short-term, commercially viable research, or do we want them to continue doing research that is on the frontier that is going to lead to the next generation of technological breakthroughs?" said Jennifer Washburn, a fellow with the New America Foundation and author of University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (Basic Books, 2005).

In part, the deal reflects a more aggressive posture taken by Harvard's Office of Technology Development, which became energized under the new leadership of Isaac Kohlberg. Kohlberg became senior associate provost and chief technology development officer at the university about two years ago. Though the Merck agreement is by no means Harvard's first industry-university collaboration, it's the first such deal since Harvard reorganized its technology transfer office, gave it a new name, and expanded its mission. It will also likely be the first of many such deals for Harvard under the office.

The details of the agreement are scant. Harvard has only said the deal covers six different labs focused on oncology and central nervous system disorders—two areas of mutual interest between the university and Merck. The agreement will extend for two years, but Harvard did not disclose how much financial support Merck will provide through the collaboration.

Playing Catch-up?
"We view it as a significant deal," said Katie Gordon, director of director of business development at Harvard's technology transfer office. "One of the things our group does differently than some other technology licensing offices is we're actively looking for these kinds of relationships."

That is troubling to Washburn, who sees such deals as undermining universities' ability to produce unbiased research.

"What strikes me about this deal with Harvard is that in the case of many institutions, real financial pressures are driving this. In the case of Harvard, you can hardly say this is true," said Washburn, referring to the university's $28-billion endowment, the largest of any university. "It's been extremely successful at bringing in money from federal sources. In Harvard's case, it's clearly trying to play catch up with schools like MIT and Stanford, which have much more extensive large-scale agreements with industry."

Harvard and other institutions argue they need such alliances to respond to the development funding gap. The partnerships enable them to perform translational research that necessary to move basic research toward commercialization. The argument is that by so doing, discoveries can actually be turned into therapies and other products that benefit the public.

But Washburn dismisses such arguments, saying they ignore the fact that many drugs already have their origins in university labs. More importantly, such talk overlooks the transformational research that gave rise to new industries, such as the biotechnology industry itself, she adds.

Changing Culture
"What's so disappointing about people looking at research in terms of only short-term translational benefit is that it's short-sighted," she said. "University research has always had enormous benefit to private industry."

The culture around such university-industry alliances has changed. Consider the $500-million agreement between BP and the University of California at Berkeley to conduct biofuels research. Announced at the start of this year, the deal stirred little public controversy outside of the UC Berkeley's academic senate. Some 15 years before, the same campus had become a focal point of a debate over such alliances, when Novartis entered into a considerably smaller $25-million agbio research agreement.

Moving forward, there will be objections over such agreements including concerns about academic freedom, the direction of research, and potential conflicts of interests for academic researchers. But the financial pressure universities feel will only accelerate these deals, and not to slow them. Ultimately, as these deals play out, universities will need to weigh what they've gained and lost, as will policymakers, who will need to decide if adequate investment is being made in the right types of research.