A recent article from the Wall Street Journal noted how, “Many universities are wringing their hands over the increasing coziness of medical schools and their corporate partners.” The article noted however that, “Susan Desmond-Hellmann, chancellor at the University of California, San Francisco, has no such qualms.”
As head of the only U.C. campus dedicated exclusively to graduate programs in health and biomedical sciences, Ms. Desmond-Hellmann has advocated getting closer with the industry in order to spark new ideas, fund research, access high-tech equipment and speed medical advances to patients.
WSJ noted how “Last year UCSF was the first school to get a partnership with Pfizer Inc.—worth up to $85 million over five years. Faculty and students will work alongside Pfizer’s top scientists and use the company’s resources. Pfizer gets access to any breakthroughs that come from the shared research.”
While some schools, such as Stanford and Michigan have begun to distance themselves from industry because of concerns for potential conflicts of interest, Desmond-Hellman is engaging with industry, rather than backing down. Medical and graduate health schools around the country would do justice to patients and those individuals waiting for cures and life saving products by following her lead, especially in light of shrinking state and federal funding.
Consequently, WSJ interviewed Ms. Desmond-Hellmann, former president of product development at Roche Holding AG’s Genentech about conflicts of interest and operating a public school like a public company.
The UCSF dean noted that it is “very unusual” and a very big shift to have a medical school chancellor come from industry. Given California’s struggle with funding, she noted that the university is eager for her to share the business knowledge she has and the knowledge hopefully about how USCF could be entrepreneurial.
Desmond-Hellmann said that she tells professors and researchers who will not work with industry that it’s a “huge mistake,” because if you want to get your discovery to society, you either need to start a company or work with a company to commercialize a product.
She noted that surgery has some of the most challenging potential conflicts of interest. For example, she said that if a physician invented a new hip investment, he/she would make a lot of money. But if you are doing the surgery, you have to make sure the hip used is the best, not the one you helped invent. It can thus be hard to separate the person is the inventor and the great technician.
Ultimately, what this interview revealed is that more medical schools across this country, especially when we are facing tight budgets and growing regulatory costs for healthcare, need to begin collaborating with industry. There are already in place in most institutions sufficient firewalls to insure that potential conflicts of interest are managed and mitigated. If more medical schools do not begin taking advantage of the resources and funding that industry can provide, it will be the education, training, and experience of physicians that will suffer, as well as the patients who never realize the true benefits of innovative new medical products and devices.