It seems that private firms aren’t the only ones affected when regulations thwart innovation.

Some California researchers were on a “fast track” to funding, which got derailed by institutional rules.  Inside Higher Ed writer Scott Jaschik explains:

These days many research universities are constantly looking for new grant competitions and encouraging their faculty members to apply. On Friday, the University of California at Los Angeles took the unusual step of telling professors not to apply to a major new grant competition from a pharmaceutical company, saying that the program violated university rules.

An e-mail marked “urgent” was sent Friday to all faculty members and deans about the Discovery Fast Track Competition, which was just announced this month and for which the sponsor — GlaxoSmithKline — is approaching faculty members directly, bypassing technology transfer offices at universities….

“To avoid initial contract negotiations, which are often perceived as the biggest bottleneck in the pharma/academia collaborative process, the [GlaxoSmithKline] team conceived the Discovery Fast Track competition as a means to rapidly identify and screen the most promising hypotheses in academia,” it said.Faculty members just started to receive invitations last week, and when UCLA officials saw the terms of the proposed agreement, they took a step they have not taken previously — and told the entire campus not to apply….

In an interview, [Brendan J. Rauw, associate vice chancellor] said that most proposals for corporate support for faculty members are coordinated through the university, which can negotiate terms consistent with university rules. He said that there was an inherent problem in a company saying that there could be no contract negotiations. Further, Rauw said that faculty members were being asked to give away rights they didn’t necessarily have (since the university has rules both for sharing intellectual property and assuring that agreements are consistent with academic principles). He also said that the phrasing of the grant proposal suggested that “background IP” from past work might be covered — even though it was not clear the company was entitled to those rights.

“This opens up our entire portfolio to a pharma company with no guarantee that our rights will be protected,” he said.

Rauw said UCLA faculty members may be among the first to have received the invitations. When he conferred with colleagues on other UC campuses last week, they had yet to receive grant details.

He noted that there has been “a perception” that universities “have given too much away” when dealing with pharmaceutical companies. Rauw said that UCLA has approved of grant relationships between GlaxoSmithKline and faculty members in the past (without problems)….