THE YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AS A PLURIPOTENT STEM CELL: THE ROLE OF INDUSTRY-ACADEMIC PARTNERSHIPS IN A SUCCESSFUL CAREER

The trajectory to success in academic medicine has in recent years become increasingly more difficult, particularly for clinician scientists. A multitude of factors have unfortunately conspired to place obstacles in the pathway to success in academia. These include, but are not limited to, 1) declining extramural funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with a clear bias to fund basic laboratory research rather than clinical research and more specifically treatment trials; 2) declining hospital revenues that previously served as a source of support for academic faculty; 3) declining university support for medical school faculty. Fundamentally the majority of academic faculty must cobble together salary and research support by a combination of clinical service, administrative and/or teaching roles and research funding. Industry offers several potential forms of support for faculty including: serving as site principal investigator in randomized clinical trials, investigator-initiated clinical studies, preclinical laboratory studies, service or data safety monitoring boards (DSMB) and involvement in drug development and clinical trial design. Finally the opportunity to be involved in data analysis from clinical trials and resultant publications is of obvious considerable academic value.

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