Following one of the key trends in pharma R&D, we charted large drugmakers' journeys back to school this year. Big Pharma companies' insatiable needs for growing their pipelines and grabbing dibs on hot new science send them running to academic labs. With some pharma groups slashing internal research operations, drugmakers have taken a shining to funding discovery and early R&D work at universities and academic medical centers.
Academic labs have led the way in many respects in basic research, and drug companies have gladly handed out grants to universities in the past with very few if any strings attached. Yet the new breed of pharma-academic alliances is different. Now drugmakers are often bankrolling work in top-flight university labs to perform early research-and-discovery duties to advance academic findings toward the commercial realm, with a university lab's pharma funder in the driver's seat.
Pharma groups have dabbled in commercializing innovations from academia for decades, but what's happened more recently is a drive to expand the number and depth of collaborations with academics and other external groups. Traditional pharma players such as Sanofi ($SNY), Eli Lilly ($LLY) and Pfizer ($PFE) have realized that their internal R&D groups alone aren't enough.
Here we've rounded up 20 notable pharma-academic collaborations from 2012 or those from previous years that made headlines this year. Check out the list and learn where Big Pharma is placing its bets and seeding projects that could yield big-time products down the road. Click here to check out the full report >> -- Ryan McBride (email | Twitter)