History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Hiroshi, Yamanaka
(Osaka University)
Ueyama, Takahiro
(Sophia University)
t-ueyama@sophia.ac.jp
Private industries, academic laboratories and clinical institutions: Complex situations in the development of genetic treatments in Japan.
In this paper, we would like to explore the ways in which the forms of intellectual property and ownership in biomedicine influence the collaboration between industry and academics in Japan; in so doing, we would like to focus on the relationship between laboratory and clinics in the frontline of researches.
Despite Japan’s position as one of the world’s leading centers in science and technology, it has been often stated that its “national systems” to convert scientific knowledge into innovational applications are very different from those of other western countries. Many trans-pacific comparisons, for example, have shown that the United States depends for industrial innovations heavily on a vast array of academic laboratories which are so generously supported by government; while on the other hand in Japan new technological applications are vastly carried out by aggressive firms and therefore the Japanese universities and their scientists are isolated from applicable innovations.
This lack of collaboration between corporations and universities in Japan, it seems, partly comes from the conceptual difference regarding intellectual property and ownership of scientific achievements, which is becoming central issues particularly in the field of biotechnology and biomedicine. The 1970s and 80s in the US witnessed that government-sponsored basic research in the biochemistry and genetics departments, sharing patent rights with institution and inventors, cultivated the environment to create spin-off companies to exploit the university patents. Why research laboratories in Japan have been unwilling to collaborate with clinical institutions? Is this observation was associated with socio-cultural reluctance to promote genetic treatments? Are there some other factors to explain this reluctance?
In order to explore these questions, we are going to investigate Japanese pharmaceutical corporations and venture firms represented by AngesMG which spun off from Osaka University. By looking at the relationships between commercially-based industries, academic laboratories, and clinical institutions, we hope to investigate the complex situations in which clinical institutions encounter the Janus face of private-academic laboratories.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006