Working with Industry

Abstract

The academic medical–industrial complex (to restate President Dwight Eisenhower’s concept of the military–industrial complex) is forever growing larger and more complex. Pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies need help from academic physicians and researchers for a variety of reasons. These include: the companies need to learn the conditions that actually need treatment or are being insufficiently treated, to new potential mechanistic pathways of pharmacologic relevance, to the identification of new therapies or technologies themselves, and then finally to the actual application of those in clinical trials to eventually garner approval from federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration. And that is not even taking into account that these academic colleagues, after a drug or device is approved, become their main market, as they begin to prescribe these drugs or encourage these institutions to buy new devices. Stated another way, the pharmaceutical and device industries ultimately feed off the medical system. That system helps those companies identify a mission in the first place, understand approaches for undertaking that mission, seeing that mission to completion (i.e., the approval of a new drug or device), and then serving as the major consumer of the product of that mission.