The growing influence of large companies on the science conducted in an academic setting, and its impacts on conflicts of interest

Quite a few trends are currently occurring in the academic world that are having a strong impact on the prevalence of conflicts of interest. These include: a higher number of professors founding startups, a larger portion of research funds coming from private sector sources, and a decreasing pool of funding from government sources.However, the rules governing the regulation of money and the current philosophy of valuable research have not evolved as rapidly. A growing concern within the scientific community is the increasing pressure these money sources create on the professors when they are faced with difficult and large decisions.

Over the past decade, the amount of government-issued funding has more or less stagnated while the number of scientists working in labs has continued to climb. This has created a pressure for lab leaders to look for funding to support the increasing number of employed scientists in their labs. Many leaders have temporarily and incompletely solved this problem by accepting funding from industrial sources. Even as the amount of money issued by the government stagnates, the amount of money that companies are providing to labs steadily increases (Fig 1). However, the terms of funding that companies issue are very different than the terms of funding for government funded grants. In fact, there is little, if any, regulatory control over the contracts that companies ask researchers to agree to.

The researcher-company relationship can create constraints on the research, as well as influence/bias the decisions the researcher makes about their lab. These conflicts of interest can also strongly and negatively influence the types of scientific questions a lab leader may want to ask. The research directions a lab pursues may be highly dependent on the business interests of funding companies. In addition, because the economic model of a vast majority of companies is to fund projects that have a high probability of success, the types of experiments a researcher may propose to work on under company funding may be biased to a stronger chance for a positive outcome, and thus are less likely to comprise of risky, bold scientific pursuits. In other words, a researcher may find themselves in a situation where they have to balance the need to keep research funding flowing and running a lab that conducts fundamental basic research that may not always yield positive, marketable results, but still valuable results that will advance the researcher’s respective field of expertise.

These points highlight the concern that is growing around the pressures these external funding sources may create for a lab leader. If current trends persist, and industrial influence continues to dominate the funding landscape, then these points should also be addressed in future scientific funding policies that arise in response to the changing times. Here, I will propose a list of steps that are intended to aid in addressing concerns of conflicts of interest arising from collaborations between companies and academic researchers.

First, administrative authorities should recognize the increase in influence private companies are having within academia. With this increase of awareness should also be an increase in standardization for the process of being funded by a company. Some restrictions should exist regarding the types of contracts that companies can make with researchers - for instance, knowledge gained by a company funded project could be required to be released publicly, but could somehow be commercially protected by patents to allow the funding company to maintain some competitive edge, while minimizing cost to the company. Another potential requirement could be to create a funding application schema similar to how the NIH reviews grant applications. An applicant can send a well-planned research proposal to a set of qualified reviewers to assess the scientific strength of the proposal and decide to pass it along to the company for review. This may help eliminate potential biases for choosing easy experiments that may have a higher chance of yielding positive results.

Second, any restriction or requirement mentioned in the first item should not be overly strict or difficult to achieve, as this could create too much friction for companies to decide to offer academic funding. The most important thing to keep in mind is that, given the current economic climate, the trend for company-based funding is continuing to rise. Any decisions that will decrease the number of funding sources for research have to be very well thought out. The last a lab wants to worry about is acquiring additional funding because a sponsor backed out due to strict regulations.

Third, a push towards respecting scientifically strong conclusions regardless of the outcome’s valence is necessary for good science to succeed. For a scientist to progress successfully in their career, a large amount of weight is placed on their published positive findings. This culture perseverates by the industrial push for positive and competitive findings from the labs they fund. If less weight were placed on positive findings, and negative findings were seen as less bad by objectively evaluating the scientific rigor the scientist employs, there would be less of a concern that industrial funding sources and startup stakes will affect decisions the scientist would make. In conclusion, conflict of interests are becoming more prevalent with increasing industrial sources of funding. While funding sources are changing quickly, rules and regulations for funding are not. Here I suggest points of discussion for changing how money is transferred from companies to research labs, so that conflicts of interest are less of an issue within labs.