Teaching translation
Efforts of university technology transfer offices to find the optimal path for commercializing discoveries have been well documented,1-3 but the offices are not set up to implement translational research directly. Indeed, a growing number of universities are creating translational programs that operate beyond the usual technology transfer track and aim to teach faculty how to advance the discoveries themselves.
In all cases, the biggest challenge is bridging the different mindsets of industry and academia. Those differences include structuring experiments to answer questions related to product concepts rather than to investigate therapeutic concepts in a more open-ended manner and working in teams that have predefined project goals rather than doing more exploratory research...