In the biomedical research world, drug industry-sponsored studies and research often are perceived to be tainted.

Critics say the research borne from pharmaceutical industry dollars serves to net profits for drug companies rather than to develop medicines for the greater good of public health. In contrast, the so-called “clean” studies that emerge from academia come from researchers keen on cures — not cash.

However, that stark view of “industry research versus academic research” has the potential to overshadow real medical achievements by industry researchers, said Paul Offit, a physician and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Offit, who just finished a book chronicling the life and achievements of Maurice Hilleman, a microbiologist who spent most of his career working for Merck, participated in a discussion Tuesday about the history and future of vaccines. The event was sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI).

Offit said he is dismayed by the lack of recognition afforded to researchers who work for high profile drug companies. According to Offit, Hilleman’s affiliation with Merck single-handedly made him a little-known name outside the research world — despite the microbiologist’s work to develop nine of the 14 vaccines currently recommended for children today for illnesses such as Hepatitis A and B, measles, mumps, rubella, meningitis and pneumonia.

The drug company tie also made Hilleman — who died in 2005 — a less-than-ideal candidate for a Nobel Prize, according to Offit, because the prizes are nearly always given to academic researchers.

During the discussion, Offit focused largely on the major differences in drug research now compared with fifty years ago. For example, in Hilleman’s day, it took only four years for the mumps vaccine he created to reach children worldwide. But Offit said such a speedy turnaround time is remarkable in light of today’s 18-year research and development cycle for a vaccine for another childhood condition known as rotavirus — a digestive track virus that causes severe diarrhea in infants and children.

Part of that lag time between drug development and approval is because of Food and Drug Administration regulations that require a larger number of patients to be enrolled in clinical drug trials to rule out adverse events pre-approval, Offit said.

Still, it was the opinion of other researchers — not the government — that hindered the use of Hilleman’s controversial research technique of obtaining viruses for vaccines from human blood, Offit said.

In the 1970s, Hilleman tried to create a Hepatitis B vaccine by using blood from infected gay men in New York City. By blasting the blood samples with a trio of chemicals — which would cause death if injected in a live body — 100 percent of the Hepatitis virus was obliterated. As it turned out, it also killed another mystery virus found inside the blood samples: HIV.

These days, most vaccines are created in labs, from viruses that are replicated from proteins. Researchers could “never get their heads around” the taboo practice of using human blood as a starting point to develop vaccines, Offit said. As a result, Hilleman’s research was halted.

The lack of innovative approaches to creating new vaccines is cause for worry, Offit said, especially in regard to HIV. “All the [HIV] strategies haven’t really done anything. We’re going to have to come up with something new,” he said.