Chancellor Highlights Value of Academic-Industry Partnerships in Boosting Scientific Research

The pharmaceutical industry gets a bad rap for having a corrupting influence on clinical trials, but that perception undermines the many scientific breakthroughs that have come from industry-backed research, according to UC San Francisco’s chancellor.

In an article published in JAMA Internal Medicine on April 22, Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, takes on allegations of fraud lobbed at industry-based clinical trials that are found to be flawed, arguing that such assumptions ignore the complexities of research. Partnering with academia, she notes, can lend credibility to trials and help raise the bar for health innovation.

“Academic faculty members are the very individuals who can best add rigor to the research process, help to make study results more transparent, and facilitate better feedback to all stakeholders,” she writes.

Read the article, titled “Improving Health With Partnerships Between Academia and Industry,” and listen to an interview with Desmond-Hellmann on the JAMA website.