Collaborating with industry: Choices for Australian medicine and universities

Collaboration between industry and academia is becoming increasingly prevalent and successful in Australia. To encourage and foster these relationships while preventing excesses, Australia needs to act now to create ethical, legal and legislative frameworks for collaboration. As the United States has progressed further than Australia in fostering and controlling collaboration between industry and academia, Australia has the opportunity to learn from the US experience. To speed the pace of development, Australia needs to consider making changes to legislation and increasing the level of government funding, either directly or by the creation of incentives for investment of venture capital and superannuation funds in biotechnology.