Instrument companies are increasingly partnering with universities and reaping the benefits. Agilent, Waters and Thermo Fisher Scientific’s academic collaborations provide R&D, application and market insights. These mutually beneficial relationships allow the company and the university to combine their resources. Several new products have emerged as a result of such partnerships.

Each year, Agilent establishes as many as 100 “collaborative connections,” as Jack Wenstrand, Agilent’s director of University Relations and External Research, referred to them, with universities. Of these, about ten are long-term strategic commitments. The partnerships involve the company’s Chemical Analysis and, particularly, its Life Science businesses. Recent partnerships include a multimillion dollar collaboration with the University of California Berkeley for its new Synthetic Biology Institute, a partnership with Chungnam National University in Korea for glycomics, and partnerships involving metabolomics, lipidomics and food safety. Agilent utilizes several types of university partnerships, including the Thought Leader program, in which professors give Agilent insight into how customers can best use its platforms; the Agilent Early Career Professor Award; and the Applications in Core Technology program, in which an Agilent employee proposes a research project to undertake with a professor on a specific problem or using a specific technology. “More than 70% of our research interactions are done with funds that are actually given as gifts,” Dr. Wenstrand said. In these cases, the company does not own the resulting intellectual property.

The components of Agilent’s academic partnerships include instrument use, mentors and funding for researchers. The instruments given to researchers sometimes include products that are not yet commercially available. Agilent also makes mentors available, who may have knowledge of the instruments’ capabilities and “how they might be modified to enable critical measurements that might not otherwise be possible in the university environment,” Dr. Wenstrand told IBO. The company also provides funding. “We really want to focus on the human relations, and those grow from collaborations that enable excellent research,” he said. “The funding is something that we do to pay our fair share. It’s not why we want people to work with us.” In some cases, Agilent also loans equipment to professors or develops curriculum or lab kits to simplify the use of its systems. “In areas of strategic importance to our future, [university partnerships] enable us to build truly deep, broad networks within universities, across relevant departments and with leading academics. We could not do this without these strategic investments,” he said.

Universities add to Agilent’s R&D. “Most of these interactions contribute to core technologies that work into R&D and contribute to differentiating product features,” Dr. Wenstrand said, adding that partnerships help expose Agilent to new technologies. Stanford University Professor Boris Murmann’s work with convertors was applied to one of the company’s instruments. “Further analysis confirmed that we could get approximately a 10 dB improvement in one key specification for an instrument by making an algorithmic modification,” he said. “If not for the academic collaboration, we would not have pursued the development work to realize the benefits of the new algorithm.”

Information from partnerships can also result in new applications for Agilent technology. A 2007 partnership with the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard University directly resulted in a new product. Agilent had developed a technology for synthesizing oligonucleotide libraries. Working with the Institute, Agilent used the technology to create SureSelect products (see IBO 4/30/10) for target enrichment prior to DNA sequencing.

University partnerships also provide Agilent with insight into future research needs. Agilent uses information from partnerships to decide what research to invest in—even research that is not commercially relevant at the time. “We work very hard to build that alignment between our future business strategy and our long-term university research investments,” Dr. Wenstrand said.

Waters is also investing in university partnerships. In 2010, Waters transformed its relationships with universities into a formal program called the Centers of Innovation (COIs). Waters currently partners with 14 COI, whose research areas include health and life science, food safety and environmental protection. Recently named COIs focus on proteomics, such as the Translational Genomics Research Institute, which will work with Waters on biomarker discovery and verification, and the Duke University School of Medicine. An earlier partnership with the University of Warwick helped to develop the SYNAPT High Definition MS (see IBO 6/15/06).

In addition to these formal partnerships, Waters also has ad hoc relationships. “Some people that we have strong relationships with, or that we want to add, may not quite fit the COI program,” explained Waters Senior Executive Tim Riley. “We have a close working relationship with at least 20 or 30 thought-leading academics who are not COI partners.” Regardless of the type of collaboration, the company’s academic partnerships create networks of relationships, said Waters Public Relations Manager Brian Murphy. Rights to products resulting from the research are negotiated and often shared.

Waters’s university partnerships involve instrumentation and funding. “Our academic partners get exposure to world-class instrumentation and software development people,” said Dr. Riley. “They may get funding for their students or their research interests, and in many cases, this results in opportunities to explore new concepts and publish on topics they may not otherwise be able to access.”

R&D is an important component of Waters’s university partnerships. Waters’s most successful chromatography product, the ACQUITY UPLC (see IBO 3/15/04), was a direct result of a collaboration with University of North Carolina Professor Jim Jorgenson. Professor Jorgenson’s research on ultra-high pressure LC “was so compelling that we basically developed a commercial version of his technology,” said Dr. Riley. A partnership with Northeastern University Professor John Engen in the area of hydrogen-deuterium exchange (HDX) led to the development of the nanoACQUITY UPLC System with HDX Technology.

University partnerships also allow Waters to expand the scope of their R&D. “Our academic partners can explore new concepts that may go beyond [our] internal development bandwidth,” Dr. Riley said. “Sometimes we really do want to explore spaces that are a little bit away from the cut-and-dried thing that we would be expected to do.” Working with universities allows Waters to “explore new fringes and frontiers of application space,” he said.

Partnerships also inform Waters’s approach to future products and their market potential. “We get exposure to interesting new ideas and analytical problems from our academic partners, and we get key thought leaders to provide feedback for development concepts and evaluate new hardware and software,” said Dr. Riley. “So it’s very useful to have real experts to bounce ideas off of and to evaluate our latest equipment and ideas.”

Thermo Fisher Scientific has set up a dedicated organization for partnerships. Started in 2004, the Biomarkers Research Initiatives in Mass Spectrometry Center (BRIMS), a division of Thermo, focuses on biomarker discovery and verification. BRIMS is currently participating in seven university partnerships of various sizes. One collaboration is with Massachusetts General Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, for the discovery of new biomarkers for stroke and assays for cardiovascular disease and stroke. Another collaboration is with Mt. Sinai Hospital in Canada to find new biomarkers for cancer and develop assays to test cancer progression. On the horizon is a collaboration with Johns Hopkins University Professor Daniel Chan. “We will be partnering with him to help his research in cancer biomarker discovery and verification, and we will be providing him MS instrumentation and expertise in software,” said Mary Lopez, director of the Biomarker Research Initiative in MS at Thermo. “We’ll also act as a verification center here at BRIMS to actually run many of the assays that are developed for that program.”

BRIMS provides instruments, expertise and sometimes funding to universities. Its role in university partnerships is one of mutual contribution, Dr. Lopez told IBO. “We’re almost like an accelerant or a catalyst. The researchers have problems that they’re trying to solve, and we are helping them by providing them the tools and technologies that they need to solve these problems more quickly.” BRIMS’ different types of collaborations include those focused on publications, those dedicated to assisting with the discovery of biomarkers and those that result in joint intellectual property. “It’s [also] much faster than if we tried to do this research all on our own. There arises a wonderful synergy between a commercial institution, such as we are—that develops technologies and has access to all of them—to partner with academic institutions and provide them with the resources that they need to solve their problems. We can run [our partners’] samples, show them how to do the analysis, and then provide them with a workflow that they can adopt in their own laboratories.”

BRIMS partnerships also help direct and accelerate Thermo R&D. “Because there is so much instrumentation and there are so many different types of products available, it’s very difficult for a particular lab to have access to everything,” said Dr. Lopez. Results of some BRIMS partnerships may be commercialized by Thermo, such as diagnostic or clinical products. A goal of BRIMS is to utilize Thermo’s range of products to build solutions and create workflows. “Where we see gaps in these workflows, we can prototype those products and then work with other divisions in the company to commercialize those,” Dr. Lopez said.

The partnerships also provide access to real-world problems. “The benefit is that we get to work with researchers that have real problems—not problems that might just be manufactured as examples internally by us,” Dr. Lopez explained. “We get to work with clinical samples [and] actual biological problems, trying to find cures for diseases or trying to develop diagnostic tests for different types of diseases or screening tests.”

Academic collaborations can also lead to products. BRIMS partnerships are responsible for Thermo’s SIEVE and Pinpoint software. SIEVE finds differentially expressed proteins or small molecules in mass spectral data. “That is a way for researchers to take the data that they generate on the MS using their clinical samples and look for biomarkers that might end up being the keys to disease,” said Dr. Lopez. Pinpoint improves the ease and speed of assay development for specific proteins or molecules.