Illustration by Rob Hadley for Cure
Overview
Industry co-authorship can predict which academic research reaches the market, and the universities doing it best are not always the ones with the biggest research budgets.
A university’s connections to the biomedical industry through co-authorship of research papers is one of the strongest predictors of translational success in academia. When a corporate scientist shares author credit with a university lab, the company has typically contributed data, samples, time, or capital to make that happen. At scale, the universities producing the highest numbers of scientific research in partnerships with industry tend to be the same ones generating spinouts, license deals, and patents—the outputs that turn lab discoveries into actual cures.
Co-authorship with industry partners was one of the inputs to the Cure Innovation Index, a nationwide ranking of 303 institutions across the full translational arc—from scientific strength to commercial output. It is also one of the measures that rewarded institutions traditional rankings can often overlook: smaller campuses with deep industry ties that can outscore much larger, better-funded research universities. The universities that scored highest on this indicator prove that.
See the full rankings here.
The Universities With the Strongest Industry Co-Authorship
Augusta University
University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
SUNY Upstate Medical University
Eastern Virginia Medical School
University of California, San Diego
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
Duke University
Rockefeller University
Harvard University
The top list demonstrates there is more than one way to build a research operation that draws industry collaborators. The institutions ranked one, two, and three each get there through a different model.
Augusta University, home of the Medical College of Georgia, is the unexpected name at number one. The school does not appear on most lists of biomedical research powerhouses, and its research budget runs well behind the nation's top academic medical centers.
What carries Augusta’s success is its clinical reach. The region houses five hospitals and an integrated academic health system anchored by the Medical College of Georgia's teaching hospital. The clinical footprint includes a 520-bed tertiary teaching hospital, a Level I trauma center, a separate children's hospital, and an integrated cancer center. That kind of base supports the applied, late-stage research that pharmaceutical and medtech companies tend to co-author.
The university has also been working to layer commercial infrastructure onto that clinical base. In February 2026, Augusta and Georgia Tech announced a joint effort to develop medical device startups in the region, with Georgia Tech contributing its Advanced Technology Development Center, the country's oldest university-based startup incubator.
The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, at number two, has built a pharma-style drug discovery operation inside an academic medical center. Its Therapeutics Discovery division handles drug discovery and preclinical development in-house and partners with companies on co-development from that base. The result is a long roster of corporate collaborations. MD Anderson holds active agreements with Genentech, Boehringer Ingelheim, Taiho Pharmaceutical, Blueprint Medicines, and Immatics, among others.
In June 2024, the cancer center added Sibylla Biotech to the list to develop folding interfering degraders, a new class of small-molecule cancer drugs. Each collaboration puts MD Anderson scientists on the same project teams as company scientists, and the joint publications follow. MD Anderson also spins research out into freestanding companies. Radiopharm Ventures, a joint venture with Radiopharm Theranostics, develops radiopharmaceutical therapies. CTMC, launched with National Resilience to manufacture cell therapies, moves them from research to clinic.
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, at number three, has institutionalized the deal-making. Mount Sinai Innovation Partners, the health system's commercialization arm, structures industry collaborations directly into faculty research workflows. In September 2024, Mount Sinai announced a comprehensive R&D agreement with IPGaia under which Mount Sinai proposes drug targets and the Japan-based platform funds development of lead compounds for licensing to pharmaceutical companies. The school has continued building infrastructure around this kind of deal: in April 2025, Mount Sinai launched an AI Small Molecule Drug Discovery Center designed to foster pharma and biotech collaborations on small-molecule therapeutics. Deals like these compound year over year, producing a steady stream of co-authored output.
Co-Authorship as an Indicator of Success
A 2013 study by Wong and Singh in Scientometrics found that university-industry co-authorship rates predicted patenting, spin-off formation, and licensing activity, independent of research quality or total output.
The question is whether the current top performers can hold their positions. Biotech funding has tightened in recent years, and large pharma companies have grown more selective about academic partners. Legacy institutions with deep histories of pharma collaboration have a buffer to fall back on. Less established campuses will need to keep proving the model under conditions that will not favor newer entrants. The institutions still ranking high in five years will be the ones whose faculty kept showing up on co-authored research through the cycle.
