NIH’s National Cancer Institute’s Relationship with Pharma and Biotech Industry

Hiding in Plain Sight: Surprising Pharma and Biotech Connections to NCI

Hot off the presses, a new publication from NIH’s Berna Uygur, Steven Ferguson, and Michael Pollack about NIH’s connection with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies titled Hiding in Plain Sight: Surprising Pharma and Biotech Connections to NIH’s National Cancer Institute has been published on PubMed Central.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), and especially its largest and oldest institute, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), have long been among the best - but perhaps not the most well-known supporters - for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, providing non-dilutive funding, scientific guidance, education for potential future employees, and importantly, collaboration opportunities including clinical trials and technology licensing partnerships. In this study, various databases were used, including the NCI Technology Transfer Center (TTC) internal agreement database, NIH technology licensing database, Global Data, Pitchbook, and NIH RePORTER, to explore and analyze collaborations and licensing partnerships between NCI TTC and life science and pharmaceutical companies. For early-stage companies receiving funding or taking part in collaborations and licensing, there is a significant relationship between these NIH agreements and successful financial exits. NCI support not only reaches these early-stage firms but also extends to the Top 20 pharmaceutical companies. These two findings highlight the importance of NCI collaborations for both early-stage and established life science and pharmaceutical companies. (Hiding in Plain Site: Surprising Pharma and Biotech Connections to NIH’s National Cancer Institute, Abstract)

If you are interested in reading this article, you can find it on PubMed Central here. If you are interested in seeing other NIH technology transfer publications or presentations, you can find them here.