Industrial Collaboration
Industrial Collaboration and a New Biotech Business Model
The IRC is collaborating with Life Technologies, a US-based, international life sciences company that provides products and services that support academic and government research institutions and pharmaceutical and biotech companies worldwide in their efforts to improve the human condition. The IRC and Life Technologies' collaboration not only represented a significant private sector investment in the Consortium early in its existence, but also integrates aspects of the Consortium’s research program with Life Technologies. Participation in the IRC represents both a product development and business opportunity to Life Technologies as well as providing a potential receptor for research findings emanating from the IRC research program. In effect, this represents a new business model such that academia and industry will benefit from a two-way knowledge transfer and importantly, this collaboration will facilitate translation of the resulting intellectual property (IP). Academic institutions are best-suited as environments that foster intellectual creativity, while companies such as Life Technologies thrive because of their team-focused, product-driven research commercialization strategies. As collaborators, the IRC and Life Technologies can inform and capitalize on each other’s strengths to drive discovery research on the regulome and to stage the IP through research tool and pre-clinical research products. As the IP base develops, then strategic alliances will be required with larger companies such as Novartis, Pfizer, GSK etc. that have the clinical trial/drug development expertise to realize the clinical therapeutic potential of the regulome IP and enhance its growing value from basic research development, pre-clinical R&D through to clinical development and therapeutic application.
