MRC Policy on academic collaborations
When drawing up academic-industry collaborations, MRC welcomes the use of the Lambert agreement, launched in 2005, which is an online ‘toolkit’ of standard model contracts designed specifically to simplify university-business partnerships and research collaborations. Under the principles of good research governance, all collaborative MRC research activities between academia and industry needs to be carried out in an appropriate contractual framework. To help facilitate this, MRC has put in place the MICA form and a Heads of Terms, which should be completed by all applicants with an industrial collaborator/s.
The MICA form outlines the nature of the collaboration and the industrial partners’ contribution to the project and the heads of terms form asks applicants to outline arrangements such as principles of IP management and distribution arrangements between the parties, key tasks and responsibilities of the partners, and project management arrangements. For further details on these forms, please visit our MICA page.
If the collaborative project involves clinical research, MRC encourages applicants to use the model Industry Collaborative Research Agreement (mICRA), which builds on the Lambert agreement and was designed by the MRC, NIHR and ABPI to support clinical research collaborations involving the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, academia and NHS organisations in the UK. Using mICRA as a template agreement will help to improve and speed up negotiations around research contracts and agreements and provide guidance on IP issues.
MRC requires IP arrangements to be agreed before a project starts, and encourages a more relaxed attitude regarding protection of IP. We realise that time is a crucial factor for industry and negotiations around IP should not be allowed to drag out for too long, as this is likely to cause industry partners to withdraw.