This spring, Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb became the latest big pharma suitors to forge a fresh round of partnerships with academia. Merck of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, announced that it would pony up $90 million over seven years to help fund the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr)—a new nonprofit based in San Diego. Calibr will hire a dedicated staff whose mission will be to bring early-stage research through preclinical development. Researchers from any institution will be able to approach Calibr to further develop their research. Although Merck retains the option to license exclusively any drug candidate developed at Calibr, the pharma giant will have no control over the institute's research agenda, nor will Merck employees have joint posts at Calibr, says Jim Schaeffer, executive director of licensing & external research for Merck Research Laboratories. Calibr's nonprofit status will also ensure that bureaucratic wrangling over intellectual property rights will be minimal, Schaeffer adds. Also in March, Bristol-Myers Squibb of New York announced that it was strengthening its partnership with Duke Translational Medicine Institute in Durham, North Carolina. A new joint steering committee will identify areas of common interest and greater opportunities to collaborate. The partnership involves very little money and intellectual property issues will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. In April, Roche announced it will also be bolstering its partnership with the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis, and Baylor Research Institute in Dallas, with a licensing agreement to bring vaccines targeting dendritic cells to treat HIV and hepatitis infections into clinical development (financial details were not disclosed). Inserm Transfert, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research's knowledge transfer company, will manage intellectual property. The announcements follow on the heels of Johnson & Johnson's January launch of the Janssen Labs, the company's 30,000-square-foot innovation center in the Torrey Pines Mesa area near San Diego. In late March, the nearby University of California (UC) San Diego agreed to build (Nat. Biotechnol. 4, 297, 2012) a $110-million facility called the Center for Innovative Therapeutics that will provide laboratory space for UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center researchers and biotech companies, and focus on translational cancer research. Although the recent wave of partnerships clearly reflects industry's need to find new ways to tap innovation, they may also be “a natural consequence” of academic centers having placed more emphasis on translational research, says Gerard Zurawski, principal investigator at Baylor. “Partnering with academic institutions may have simply become more attractive to industry.”