Academia - Industry Interaction

Since the mid-1990s cooperation between FDA and industry, facilitated by academia, has proceeded at an unprecedented pace. This is a much different relationship than the primarily adversarial interactions that were common between government and industry in decades past. The hope is that the new era of cooperation will continue to better promote the delivery of an ongoing stream of safe and effective new phar-macotherapeutic agents. 

While the methods described in this chapter have been optimized for affinity selection-MS using continuous SEC, they are readily adaptable to spin-column, gel permeation, or other well validated and highly accessible two-stage AS-MS designs. The use of AS-MS for studying protein-ligand interactions, especially for the discovery of ligands from pools of compounds, has been reported by a number of experts in the pharmaceutical industry and academia over the past decade. 

Since it was created in 1982, the FDA s Office of Orphan Products Development has been dedicated to promoting the development of products that demonstrate promise for the diagnosis and/or treatment of rare diseases or conditions. To locate such products, the Office of Orphan Products Development interacts with the medical and research communities, professional organizations, academia, and the pharmaceutical industry, as well as rare disease groups. The Office of Orphan Products Development administers the major provisions of the Orphan Drug Act, which provide incentives for sponsors to develop products for rare diseases. 

The importance of catalyst stability is often underestimated not only in academia but also in many sectors of industry, notably in the fine chemicals industry, where high selectivities are the main objective (1). Catalyst deactivation is inevitable, but it can be retarded and some of its consequences avoided (2). Deactivation itself is a complex phenomenon. For instance, active sites might be poisoned by feed impurities, reactants, intermediates and products (3). Other causes of catalyst deactivation are particle sintering, metal and support leaching, attrition and deposition of inactive materials on the catalyst surface (4). Catalyst poisons are usually substances, whose interaction with the active surface sites is very strong and irreversible, whereas inhibitors generally weakly and reversibly adsorb on the catalyst surface. Selective poisons are sometimes used intentionally to adjust the selectivity of a particular reaction (2). 

Through healthy scientific interaction between industry and academia we expect in the near future that these important phenomena will form the basis of industrial plant design and operations and that more academicians will turn their attention to investigate these phenomena in industrial systems. 

Increasing interactions between academia and industry and true partnerships... 

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