Tufts' Institute for Biopharmaceutical Partnerships last month launched an online interactive feature aimed at attracting potential collaborators in the pharmaceutical industry.
The institute, founded two years ago, is an initiative run by Tufts School of Medicine (TUSM) and the university's Advancement Division in the interest of creating and managing partnerships between the university's medical researchers and the pharmaceutical industry.
The website, or "HUB," is the latest of the institute's projects to develop partners in the pharmaceutical industry to transform research done at the university into medical technologies and real-life medical outcomes in the pharmaceutical industry.
Institute founder and Chief Business Officer Lawrence Botticelli said the new website will enhance the capabilities and scope of the organization.
"Indeed, establishment of such a website was an early strategic objective, now achieved," Botticelli said in an e-mail to the Daily.
HUB allows online visitors to browse research projects and developments occurring in different fields at Tufts, providing links to related publications and studies by Tufts faculty.
It also provides a feature through which website visitors have the ability to search for research being done in a specific area of study, such as biology and aging or regenerative medicine and inflammation, and allows them to contact the institute if they are interested in partnering with the researchers.
The website's ability to facilitate communication between Tufts researchers and those interested in marketing their work will create valuable collaborations, Botticelli believes.
"[The partnerships will] provide financial and technological resources to support a range of life-sciences research activities, facilitate the development of innovative technology platforms and drug discovery research initiatives and spur preclinical development research activities with the express purpose of facilitating the generation and selection of new drug candidates," Botticelli said.
Collaboration between pharmaceutical companies and university researchers is a logical one, David Damassa, professor and dean for Information Technology at TUSM, said.
"Many of the researchers rely on pharma compounds for basic biological research, so that sets up a partnership," Damassa said. "There have been many examples of instances where researchers have partnered with companies to advance science."
Damassa said the website would promote the transformation of medical discoveries made at Tufts into practical realities for patients.
"The site fosters the dissemination of Tufts intellectual property and brings life sciences to the bedside," he said.
These partnerships could also financially benefit the university, according to Botticelli.
"Revenue streams from such activities are multiform," Botticelli said. "They range from service fees, upfront fees and performance-driven payments to proceeds from revenue-sharing joint venture models, back-end royalty flows and profit[-]sharing arrangements."
David Greenblatt, chief scientific officer of the institute, added that — ideally — a majority of any financial benefit generated by the HUB would be channeled toward continued research and development among the university's medical researchers.
"To establish ties to industrial and other outside sponsors would ultimately yield support of collaborative research," Greenblatt said.
