Over a span of more than 60 years, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society has thrown several billion dollars into research, its biggest weapon in the war on blood cancers. Louis DeGennaro, the society’s chief mission officer, now has a new weapon: university collaboration.
DeGennaro, from his office in White Plains, N.Y., has been working with the University of Kansas Cancer Center researchers to develop drugs that could be commercialized for treatment of patients with blood cancers—drugs that would otherwise have never been produced by pharmaceutical giants because the potential customer base is too small. The work with KU, DeGennaro said, has set a new standard for speed and efficiency in moving a drug from concept to clinical trial.
“If we can bring new therapies to patients faster, we put that in the win column,” he said. “We bring the research portfolio, they bring the tools and the technology that need to be applied to advance these projects to the next step. Each contributes something invaluable to the partnership.”
His organization, then, is benefiting from a trend that’s gaining momentum among research universities nationally and in the Kansas City region: forging new alliances with non-academic organizations to leverage their resources and produce outcomes greater than the sum of their parts. The concept of business-university collaboration isn’t new; companies and universities have been working on joint research projects since before World War II, and university research skyrocketed after 1980, when new federal laws allowed campuses to share in the proceeds from commercialization of their work.
What is new is the sharpened focus on results, and selecting partners whose needs—and whose own contributions to the cause—produce the greatest chances for the best outcomes. In many ways, the trend mirrors the internal changes campuses themselves have made to break their colleges, schools and departments out of the long-established silos of knowledge.
“There are probably three driving factors,” behind that on-campus trend, said Betty Drees, dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “One is the recognition that opportunities for great discovery often comes in merging of two different disciplines, such as the schools of medicine and engineering, or medicine and social work, dentistry and engineering, or law and business,” she said. “When you start taking people from very different backgrounds, the diversity of viewpoints and expertise often triggers some interesting innovations.”
Other motivators, she said, are the need to leverage resources and the efficiencies that come from sharing information, which helps similar lines of research avoid proven dead ends. “Sharing knowledge helps produce this explosion of innovation,” Drees said, because “it makes efforts more efficient by people not being siloed.”
Business Gives Back
Scott Weir, a KU Cancer Center researcher working closely with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society project, said the center’s success to date stems from “a knack for establishing high-performance collaborations and partnerships.”
“We identify partners where we share common goals, visions or missions,” he said. “It’s not about who gets credit or who takes the lead; it’s more focused on outcomes and results.” In that sense, he said, the center was operating more like a well-managed business than an academic institution, and with good reason: The leadership has been focused on bringing on researchers with backgrounds in business settings.
(...continued)