SCIENCE:Partnerships with industry and academic researchers can help foster innovation, but they need to be carefully controlled, outlines CLAIRE O'CONNELL

A DECADE or two ago, "industry" was a dirty word for many academic scientists in Ireland. Hitching your research to a commercial interest could invite frowns from colleagues and whispers of taking the king's shilling.

How times have changed. Today, several research initiatives marry industry and academia to get the best of both worlds.

Industry can link in with the kind of innovative, back-to-the-sandpit research that's too risky for the corporate environment, while the university-based researchers get to build up some business savvy about industry needs and practices.

Still, this type of collaboration has to be managed properly. Cynics argue that PhD students provide cheap labour for industry and that the commercial bottom line could compromise academic freedom.

Everyone involved has to accommodate the potential culture clash between industry and academia, where timelines and expectations can differ radically.

However, when it works, it's a win-win situation, says Dr Keith Murphy, a principal investigator with the Applied Neurotherapeutics Research Group (ANRG), at University College Dublin's Conway Institute. The group looks for new drug targets in brain conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

The ANRG and pharma-giant Wyeth have forged a partnership that's now in its fifth year and together they have gone back to basics, looking at molecular pathways in the brain and what goes awry in disease models.

The research cluster, which includes scientists from UCD, Trinity College Dublin and Wyeth, has been funded to the tune of €10 million by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and Wyeth. However, there's more to these partnerships than money, says Murphy.

It's also about granting industry the freedom to explore and be innovative at a time when the drug pipeline is running low, while offering academics commercial expertise and high-throughput techniques to boost their research. "The pharma companies know they have to come up with new ideas and new approaches, but it's too big a financial risk for them to do that, so they really need academics to take it to a point where it makes sense for them to take it on from there," explains Murphy.

Meanwhile, the researchers - including the PhD candidates - get industry exposure, which is an invaluable base for their future careers.

"If they stay in academia, they will have an amount of savvy about how industry works and if they want to move into industry, they will have built up contacts," says Murphy.

However, it has been argued that if industry funds basic academic research, there is a risk of those who pay the piper calling the tune.

"That is a perception," says Murphy, "but the crux of that matter is how prescriptive the industry partner is in the collaboration.

"In most SFI-funded collaborations, the industry partner is a true research partner rather than being very prescriptive - that's certainly the case for us. In most initiatives, the academic partners have as much a say in what research gets done as the industry partner, if not more, and that safeguards against the scenario of industry getting work done by skilled people for less than it would cost them to do it in the open market," says Murphy.

What about the practicalities of combining industry and academic approaches?

"Initially it's quite a challenge when you are not familiar with each other's culture," says Murphy. "You learn as academics to be good on data storage, tracking, time-stamping and all the quality control you need in industry. You have to be aware that you need to protect information before you publish it - that's a thorny issue, but the reality is that very few publications are really held up by the need to patent information first," he says.

In an applied research area, such as drug development, the pay-off is in the real-life results. "At a very fundamental level, there has to be academic freedom to the research that is done, it can't be completely driven by commercial needs," says Murphy.

"However, ultimately it's about developing therapeutics to be used in a human dimension and really only the big companies are going to be able to take it that far. I see this as an advantage of working with industry," he says.

Software is another competitive and applied area ripe for collaboration between industry and academic partners and the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre (Lero) strives to make the links.

"I'm like a dating agent. I am taking 'tall, dark and handsome' researchers and matching them up with 'blonde, bubbly' companies," says Dr Jack Downey, industry liaison at Lero, an SFI-funded collaboration between UCD, the University of Limerick, Trinity and DCU.

The aim is to encourage interaction with local entrepreneurs and also build up the software research base in Ireland to attract further multi-nationals.

Downey says he has to take account of the specific needs of potential industry and academic partners.

"Industry isn't a homogenous mass. You have the big companies like IBM and the Microsoft who spend billions on research, so you have no business explaining to them what a research centre is," he explains.

"But at the other end of the scale, if you go to an SME, the first thing they ask is 'what's in it for me?' We find SMEs very accommodating for giving us access to data if someone wants to study a real company in action, or if we come up with a gadget, they have a go of it and if it goes well, they can have it for free."

The cost-effectiveness of PhD researchers is very much part of the equation, explains Downey, who is based at UL.

"The way we are pitching this is if you were to hire someone who was bright enough to do this, how much would it cost? And if it turns out to be a complete waste of time, how do you lay off the person?" he explains. "If, instead, you sponsored a PhD, we could assign the person to look at this problem and it would cost you €23,000 per year, which you can claim back against your tax.

"At the end of the day, if things go well, feel free to offer him a job, or if the whole thing falls flat, then you have only spent €23,000 per year."

The approach is particularly suited to the product-focused software arena, says Downey. "Software engineering is an applied discipline. There's no point in having an ivory tower where you think beautiful thoughts - unless software is developed and made and sold and distributed, what's the point?"

On the flip-side, the university-based researchers in the partnerships get a valuable education about the needs of industry, says Downey, who returned to academia after years in industry and has experience of both sides of this type of research partnership.

Industry-based researchers are also encouraged to link their work into a fourth-level degree. Dr John Burton, an employee of medical device company Vitalograph, recently worked with Lero to earn his PhD while improving risk management in the company's software production.

Another recent partnership with Intel Embedded Communication Group's Irish operation in Shannon allowed Lero researchers to test out agile methods in an industry environment.

Keeping the focus on such real-world applications is a key to matching up the partners in software research, according to Downey. "The best thing is having something tangible - if someone wants something, then I have found industry very accommodating," he says.