Academic - Industrial Research Collaborations

Part of the reason for the lack of natural product-based antifouhng alternatives is the necessity for expertise that historically is only found in an academic-industry research collaboration. The cross purposes of academia and business make it difficult to collaborate. Both academia and industry usually frown upon such research collaborations. The coatings industry usually does its research in-house and shies away from joint research and development programs. At the 10th International Congress, there was one report on isolation of natural products for prevention of larval settlement from an industrial source.140 This report was from scientists trained in academia and hired by a coatings company to do in-house studies of natural products. 

For HCS to be fully accepted by academia, several conditions will need to be fulfilled. Current HCS instruments are closed black boxes and their expensive maintenance contracts do not allow any hardware or software modifications for adaptation to the diverse needs of academic research. Academic research is typically more diversified than pharmaceutical industry research and the instruments need to be more customizable than they are now. In addition, the image and data formats need to be accessible and open. In academia data is shared between collaborators and will be analyzed with various, partly custom-made software. Therefore the data needs to be accessible and open. Lastly, the yearly costs of maintenance contracts and licenses are particularly difficult to finance in academic research that relies heavily on grants. Grants typically do not cover licensing costs or if they do, when the grant runs out, new sources of funding must be found. In reality, those costs must generally be covered by institutional funds. 

The RAID process cannot be used by private industry (which can interact with NCI through the DN process), though it can be used to develop a product licensed to a small business (defined as having 500 or fewer employees). The existence of research collaborations between the academic investigators and large companies does not affect the eligibility for support from RAID for an individual product, provided the product is not licensed to the company. 

Quite clearly, collaborations are the way forward for polymer colloids research, but such research is inhibited in the UK by the dispersed locations of the academics active in the field. The UK Polymer Colloids Forum, which was set up in 1993 to act as a focus for the UK polymer colloids community, embracing both industry and academe, has recently published a booklet giving profiles of the UK academics with research interests and activities in the field... 

While these developments were noted in Europe and the US, little action was taken outside of Germany to improve industrial research and industrial-academic collaboration. British chemist Raphael Meldola s experience in the English synthetic dye industry... 

The demand for researchers who focus on the clinical pharmaceutical sciences has exceeded the supply. Individuals graduating from CPS programs have secured successful careers within academic, industrial, and governmental institutions (Fig. 2). Academic institutions are major employers of CPSs within the clinical or basic science divisions in the various health-related schools. The CPSs unique blend of clinical and research skills allow these individuals to develop interdisciplinary collaborations and thus are aggressively sought by research... 

Developments in asymmetric metal catalysis often involve efforts among pharmaceutical researchers, catalyst developers and academic scientists. Close collaboration between academic laboratories and industry has helped to ensure that discoveries are quickly scaled. 

FIRST Faraday - http //www.firstfaraday.com/. FIRST is a DTI, EPSRC and NERC funded partnership to encourage academic-industrial collaboration in research, training and technology transfer. 

Curricula In colleges and universities reflect not only the state of knowledge In the discipline but the Interests of the faculty. In turn, those Interests, because of the nature of the academic value and reward systems, are Influenced powerfully by disciplinary fashions. If industrial research needs happened to coincide with disciplinary fashions, this Symposium would likely never have been organized nor would there have been such repetitious scrutiny of the boundary between Industrial and academic science or of the education of the practitioners. Indeed, some of the resurgence of attention to serious research collaboration between the two communities arises In today s coincidence of certain disciplinary fashions and Industrial Interests. 

Both academic and industrial research and development, as well as cooperation between industries, has resulted in a large effort in the discovery, synthesis, and catalytic application of framework metal-containing zeotype materials. These collaborations have led to new appHcations of metal-containing zeotype materials for the large-scale production of chemicals without major by-product formation. New environmentally friendly processes such as propylene epoxidation, phenol hydroxylation, ammoximation of cyclohexanone, and aromatization of light paraffins have been commer-ciahzed. Many new developments are in the pipehne, and they will Hkely be commerciahzed when both the economics and the environmental requirements become favorable. 

The symposium was the first one to explore this new area of research in synthetic chemistry. The numerous connections made between academic and industrial chemists at the symposium to establish research collaborations should hasten the further adoption of benign chemistry principles in industrial practice. The favorable audience reception, the extensive press coverage, the enthusiasm of our individual speakers, and the reaction of the scientific community following the symposium encouraged us to capture the essence of the symposium in this book. We acknowledge our authors and speakers for their cooperation and support in presenting the s)miposium and preparing chapters for this book. 

In-House Collaboration. Many of the industry interviewees noted that the problem of bridging between research ideas and product development that occurs in industry-university collaborative research is also present within a company the same break downs in communication and understanding can occur. Some interviewees stated that the research divisions of their firms even view themselves as part of the academic system. 

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