Advancing Your Research
Cultivate resources and relationships to meet your goals
Scientific collaborations with industry partners can promote intellectual exchange, advance work on a project toward commercialization opportunities, and attract financial support for your lab.
Industry-sponsored research & strategic alliances
Industry-sponsored research brings real-world problems directly into the lab to foster tangible solutions for society. Strategic alliances with corporate partners advance research in various disciplines across the university to address important unmet needs and make substantial progress in a wider field. These relationships can help you develop your ideas and early-stage technologies toward future licensing while enriching your work with new perspectives.
Harvard’s Office of Technology Development has a dedicated Alliance Management team to support research teams at every step of the process. OTD’s Alliance Management team provides a single point of contact to facilitate the alliance and project execution from launch to end goal.Check out our current funding opportunities below with an open request for proposals and current active alliances between Harvard and industry partners. Reach out to the OTD Alliance Management team with any questions.
Request for proposals
Harvard University and Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (ONO) launched a five-year strategic alliance to advance research across various therapeutic areas. This collaborative effort marks a significant commitment to identify and develop first-in-class therapeutics for medical conditions in the areas of oncology, immunology, neurology, and specialty.
The request for proposals will be for research projects focused on the validation of novel therapeutic targets and the discovery of new drugs. This opportunity is only available to researchers with rights as a Principal Investigator and whose employer is Harvard University.
Guidelines and details on submitting a proposal are below and accessed with a valid HarvardKey.
Note: You must have valid HarvardKey credentials to access the RFP. Please do not post or redistribute the document.
Active alliances
OTD is currently spearheading the following strategic alliances between Harvard and industry partners. These alliances support research in various disciplines in numerous labs across the university, working collaboratively to develop solutions for global impact.
- Advancing biomedical research and drug discovery – Harvard University and Astellas Pharma Inc. established a strategic research alliance to support multiple, multi-year research projects in a range of therapeutic areas. Read more.
- Addressing emergent viral diseases – Harvard University and AbbVie established a collaborative research alliance, forming a multi-pronged effort at Harvard Medical School to develop novel therapies against emergent viral infections. Read more.
- Development of complex medicines – Harvard University and National Resilience, Inc., a manufacturing and technology company, established a five-year R&D alliance from Resilience directed toward the development of complex medicines, including biologics, vaccines, nucleic acids, and cell and gene therapies. Read more.
- Launch of Lab1636 to speed the development and translation of biomedical and life-science innovations - Harvard University and Deerfield Management, a health care investment firm, have established a major strategic R&D alliance to launch Lab1636. The focus is to catalyze the development of novel therapeutics and rapidly drive innovations toward clinical validation. Read more.
- Therapeutics addressing cardiometabolic diseases and rare blood and endocrine disorders – Harvard University entered into a collaboration with Novo Nordisk and Evotec SE, to establish LAB eN², a translational drug discovery accelerator that aims to nurture preclinical research from academic institutions for the development of novel therapeutics. The focus is on addressing unmet needs in cardiometabolic diseases as well as rare blood and endocrine disorders. Read more.
Reach out to OTD’s Alliance Management team for more details on active alliances at Harvard.
Harvard University and Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (ONO) launched a strategic alliance to advance research across various therapeutic areas.
OTD’s well-crafted corporate partnerships have enabled researchers in my lab to follow their curiosity, connect with new collaborators, and pursue more ambitious studies than we could have done alone.
Prof. Daniel Kahne
FAS Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Working with OTD
With our knowledge of the market, business contacts, and ability to cultivate and sustain productive relationships with industry, we can help you to form strong collaborations even when commercialization is far in the future.
We provide you with ongoing professional support throughout the process of developing proposals and identifying and engaging the appropriate corporate partner. Above all, our thoughtful agreements protect academic freedom and values.
Harvard was ranked 3rd among Thomson Reuters’ 100 “Most Innovative Universities” worldwide in 2019.
Accelerators
To bridge the development gap for academic research, OTD has established the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator, the Harvard Grid Accelerator in partnership with Harvard SEAS, and the Climate and Sustainability Translational Fund in partnership with the Salata Institute. Accelerator funding of faculty research frequently leads to industry sponsorship, licensing, or the launch of a startup.
Harvard’s two pioneering accelerators have become model programs for other universities around the world.
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