Robert Posen, the head of the state’s Office Commerce and Labor, told the audience during his presentation that the state continues to reserve deep tax cuts for manufacturers despite budget woes.

Throughout a discussion period at the end of the summit, industry leaders pointed to misunderstandings between university labs and the companies that license the labs’ technologies. In particular, they expressed skepticism over the readiness of university-developed technologies for the commercial market, and the efficiency of the sale process.

“The tech transfer process is a very labor-intensive one,” explained Joyce Brinton, Harvard’s director of Office Technologies and Trademark Licensing. “Our outreach to companies is less than optimal.”

Responding to criticism over the sluggish progress of clinical trials in University labs, Harvard Medical School (HMS) Dean Joseph B. Martin pointed to a number of speed bumps, including a lack of collaboration between scientists, doctors and administrators.

“At the Med school, you can always find someone working on almost anything in the realm of science,” he said during his talk. “The problem is to get the people at HMS to work together.”

Hyman said after the conference that Harvard had to improve its interactions with industry, but that HMS would likely continue to avoid late stage clinical trials—which are needed by companies for federal approval—because they have little academic value.

“I don’t want us to become basically a clinical trial mill,” he said. “Yes, we should do clinical trials, especially design stage trials and also larger ones where we have real intellectual control and input. But what I’m skeptical of is really wanting to be a place where industry can cheaply and efficiently do its clinical trials.”

He added that concerns over conflicts of interest should remain at the front of every researcher’s mind, especially in light of the death of a human test subject at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000.

“We never should put human beings at risk in a conflicted situation,” he said. “We need to make sure that when we’re engaged in clinical trials nobody thinks the outcome is driven by economics.”

An internal study of conflict of interest at HMS is currently underway, but no policy change is likely to be announced this year, Martin said.

—Stephen M. Marks contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Alex L. Pasternack can be reached at apastern@fas.harvard.edu