Where will my shiny new tools come from?

I left science quite some time ago; I loved my tools more than the discoveries they enabled. And yes, us ravens are easily distracted by shiny objects and there are more of those to bring home to your nest if you move to the dark side of industry. But it used to be a rewarding experience – scientific questions pushing technology development, and new technologies then enabling new observations. It used to be almost like a symbiosis between the scientific community seeding new technologies and companies commercializing them to make them more usable by the broader research community. But has anyone else started worrying that us ravens have become more and more obsessed with hoarding shiny things and have neglected to maintain that healthy collaboration at the cutting edge of research?

The past decade has seen a massive consolidation of companies serving the scientific community into a few big, public companies. While that comes with the advantage of global presence and availability, the more specialized technologies serving niche applications often don't survive long after an integration. At the same time, ideas originating at universities have been spun out more frequently using (until very recently) abundantly available capital. But those investors want their money back at some point, and these start-up companies are therefore forced to feed the acquisition machinery of the big companies. In sum, both trends impose a simple rule on technology commercialization – only those technologies serving a big enough market are worth doing. Any technology project serving a small scientific community (e.g. the basic life sciences) will be compared to products serving much bigger markets (e.g. clinical diagnostics or biopharma production). This results in the funnel for new technologies serving (life) sciences becoming too selective. Within a big multinational, only a business case promising massive returns will win development resources. And following that, venture capitalists will invest mainly into those ideas that, over time, will mature into a business worth the attention of those big companies. Consequently, many neat new ideas are sitting on the shelves of technology transfer offices. And technologies already in use are affected as well – they often remain on outdated platforms as a complete re-development is considered prohibitively expensive, and the improvements, add-ons or interfaces that are needed for pushing fundamental research using the technology forward are never realized.

This trend leaves this humble member of the Corvidae worried. We need more and more specialized tools to dissect the wonders of nature at finer and finer detail. But where will these tools come from? Maybe it is time for the scientific community to start yielding the significant power they still hold? Ravens are easily mesmerized by the big coffers of gold held by giant biopharma companies. In contrast, business with individual academics is considered hard. It often takes years (don't you love the grant lottery?) and will always include some kind of special request (how else could the science be unique?). But if you sum up all these hard-won individual deals, the total size of that business is enormous. And business with the academic community is safe in times of crisis, as there still tends to be money poured into government-funded research when the economy stumbles. So how can scientists steer the attention of us easily distracted ravens back to their needs? Well, take control over where those coins are allowed to go!

Many existing instrument platforms serve the basic needs of the scientific community, but to push discovery further, modifications and adjustments are often needed. It costs significant money to document and maintain such interfaces; hence, many companies never implement them or discontinue support when money needs to be saved. A simple way to incentivize the provision of properly documented and supported interfaces is to simply make them mandatory as part of the purchasing process. If this works to enforce data interfaces at big pharma companies, who require a seamless stream of instrument data into their data-management systems, why wouldn't it work across, for example, all NIH-funded instrument purchases? This way, companies investing into providing the necessary access into the inner workings of their off-the-shelf platforms are rewarded. And as the alternative is a complete loss of business, it will make the business case for such maintenance viable.

Now such modifications can be quite significant for specific research purposes and there are usually at least two big factors regularly derailing such efforts. First, because a commercial instrument has usually been developed and tested against all relevant safety standards, any modifications will obviously void those certifications, raising all kinds of alarm bells in the manufacturer's legal department. Similarly, warranties and service coverage will immediately be questioned – how can the manufacturer assume responsibility for a customer-modified instrument? On an individual basis, such discussions between two legal departments can easily drain the will to live from any researcher involved. But maybe the solution is to simply be pragmatic? The Lambert framework, which was designed to assist universities and companies that wish to undertake collaborative research projects with each other, has streamlined IP discussions in collaborations tremendously, providing simple and pragmatic templates for various scenarios that are known to be fair. Could a similar framework be developed to define liability limitations and maintenance requirements in a collaborative modification effort? By being more aggressive and making it a requirement for all purchases, not just those that may be modified, the scientific community holds significant power to reward a supportive attitude of their suppliers.

Finally, what can be done to ensure a continuous pipeline of new technologies to serve scientific discovery? For technologies that might have a path to a big market outside academia, a simple clause in license or spinoff agreements enforcing a certain focus on revenue in academia could help. It would prevent commercialization from focusing exclusively on industrial markets too early and ensure that the technology also has an impact on scientific discovery. Although it might be frowned upon as a distraction, it will most likely create a win–win situation, as the academic user base will create continuous innovation on which to build. For technologies or projects that do not have a visible path to a billion-dollar market (yet), the situation is a bit more complicated. While there used to be many examples of small companies successfully building a self-sustaining business on specialized technology serving research, the current economics do not play in favour of such an approach. Any investment in such an endeavour would take many years to pay back, if at all, as with the consolidated vendor space it would always be questionable if there was ever a cash event providing an opportunity to realize a return on investment. With private money hence being an unlikely source of funding, it might be up to government or university funding to back such endeavours. This will require more continuous support of technology dissemination efforts. Open-source software projects could serve as examples; some packages driven by a few dedicated academic researchers have successfully outperformed commercial software for years. If grant funding for new equipment plus some infrastructure support from big funding agencies could be channelled into not-for-profit knowledge centres for technology development and dissemination, many technologies and projects could suddenly have a viable path to a somewhat broader use in research. Such centres could develop and build prototypes for use in-house and later focus on instrumentation to be sold to researchers worldwide. Several big funding organizations in different countries have started national centres for certain key technologies. These already contain application experts and would only need to be extended by adding in engineering resources to act as a starting point for such an open technology dissemination approach.

Now, it’s not all bleak. I am well aware of many positive examples of collaborative development efforts. But I am also convinced that if we did more, science could move faster. And the scientific community and its funding bodies could force some of that change to strengthen the symbiosis between scientific discovery, technology development and technology commercialization, which would ultimately broaden and accelerate the technology funnel for commercial players. Just imagine the shiny future we could create – a steady stream of glittery new tools enabling exciting discoveries and fuelling an industry employing happy ravens!