By Megan Scudellari

Pharmaceutical companies have sponsored research at academic centers for decades. But in the past few years, these collaborative agreements have escalated from small one-off contracts with individual labs to broad, big-money alliances that offer a hefty supply of perks but also a fair share of conflicts.

“Over the years, things have changed,” says Inder Verma, a Sanofi-Aventis–funded gene therapy researcher at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. “There’s greater and greater interest in seeing whether our discoveries have the potential to be used in translational research. And, really, who is better at that than industry?”

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