Sell out of Academia_Pfizer Buys Academia (part 3)

Pfizer (the biggest drug dealer in the world) again announces a pay off to infiltrate into publically funded academic labs in an effort to develop their pipeline for profit-making drug. Tax payer- funded academic research laboratories all over the country are being mixed in the pot for profit making deals for industry.

Who comes out the winner? Not taxpayers who pay out billions of dollars for little return.

Conflicts of interests and loss of patent rights within academic research make these academic-industrial complex deals stink for the public. While the public pays out billions of dollars, they get little in return and little focus into public health issues and public safety issues.

Pfizer has spent millions of dollars setting up collaborations in California and New York in labs that are taxpayer funded. Now Pfizer announces another $100 million dollar collaborations over the next five years with eight leading universities and research institutes in Massachusetts. It’s a lucrative investment for Pfizer who is making billions of dollars off the taxpayers back.

Public funding to academic laboratories that collaborate with money making companies should be withdrawn and given to laboratories that do research focused for the public good. In these hard hit economic times, it only makes sense. It will create more jobs which is something we need now.

The list of academic labs that have conflicts of interest with money-making schemes with rich pharma, persist to grow. These labs continue to take public funding while doing for profit research. They are in essence are double dipping into funds for research when other good scientist go without funding.

Here is only a partial list of academic institutes which do “for profit scientific research” for Pfizer and where public funding should be reconsidered for reallocation to other academic centers that focus research for the public’s welfare:

Boston University, Harvard University, Tufts University and University of Massachusetts Medical School., MIT, University of California San Francisco, Rockefeller University, New York University Langone Medical Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Mount Sinai Medical Center, Columbia University Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Weill Cornell Medical College.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/pfizer-announces-100-million-research-collaboration-with-academic-scientists/33678