Good medicine needs industry backing

But we lack the financial and commercial resources to take our ideas to the "market" where disease exists; we can't do this without the pharmaceutical industry. That is why Baker IDI has entered into a unique collaboration with Sanofi-Aventis Australia. Sanofi-Aventis will donate 25c to Baker IDI for every Plavix prescription dispensed in pharmacies in Australia this year.

Academic partnerships with pharmaceutical companies are not new. They are essential as they are the only pathway from a discovery in a laboratory to a lifesaving drug distributed to every pharmacy in the world.

The scientific community has, by nature, a strongly competitive culture. Competition for peer recognition, funding and professional advantage is embedded in academe, yet progress in modern scientific research is achieved mostly by collaborative teamwork.

Nonetheless, the power in the relationship between the academic medical research community and the pharmaceutical industry is imbalanced, and must be addressed. In Australia it is largely governments that fund the underlying capacity for research in the medical research institutes and universities, and philanthropic donors buy us much of our equipment and other supports that are not funded directly by grants.

This creates a powerful, world-class discovery machine which the pharmaceutical industry often treats like a shopping mall that it has no responsibility to help maintain.

We want to see our discoveries turned into therapies and recognise the pharmaceutical industry as the only effective means of achieving this. But the absence of pharmaceutical industry funding from pure undirected research, which underpins all downstream applied discovery of the kind that produces new drugs, is shameful.

Academe must take the lead in rectifying this. Instead of gratefully receiving small handouts as funding for pet projects expires in return for abdication of IP rights as so often happens, we must demand industry support for the infrastructure and broad capacity that makes discovery possible in the first place.

There are many ways in which funding of this kind can be generated proportionally - for example from sales of proven drugs - and the funding can even reasonably target research communities working on themes of broad interest to the company providing the funds. Innovation in funding in Australia is now as critical as innovation in research.