Collaborative Research Agreements
CARA establishes Collaborative Research Agreements (CRA), which
are intended to be multi-year and involve funding for dedicated equipment and
staff. In return, the sponsor
receives access to CARA resources and knowledge.
The intention of a CRA is to enter into a significant
research/technology development effort to solve some of the major problems and
challenges facing industrial and government partners (translational
science). Thus, CRA's are expected
to be three years in duration, which often will involve proof-of-concept for
the first year, and result in significant invention, training, exchange of
personnel and in general generate results which have a significant positive
impact on the drug development of the industrial partner and thus a significant
return on investment. In many cases, the research, which is generally
published, can also have a broad impact on biotechnology as a whole.
Examples of CRA type agreements have been in the areas of biopharmaceutical process optimization, validation of potency models using proteomics analysis of expression pathways and the determination of critical quality attributes and structure function relationships of complex glycoproteins.