Big Pharma is going back to school.

To help reverse a decline in drug pipelines, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and Harvard Business Schools Health Industry Alumni Association host a conference today chronicling both the complexities of bringing drugs to market, and how collaborations between academia and Big Pharma are giving the drug developers a much-needed shot in the arm.

Innovation and drug discovery and development is happening in academia and in biotech, and Boston is a renowned center for biotech, said conference co-chairman Wolfgang Klietmann, a lecturer on pathology at Harvard Medical School. The two sides have to reunite to achieve innovation in drug discovery and overcome the attrition of the pipelines, which is a major concern overall in the drug development industry.

The conference will be held at Harvard Medical Schools Joseph P. Martin Conference Center.

Klietmann, citing a recent gene transfer partnership between Novartis and the University of Pennsylvania, said its essential for academic physician-scientists to think past the notion of industriophobia, as new drugs can cost up to $1.5 billion and take an average of 12 years to develop.

There is a necessity for a more natural collaboration, and medical schools and also the industry are very well aware of it, he said. I sense here a new climate for openness.

Along with panel discussions, guest speakers include Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, who will discuss the role of social entrepreneurship in the future of medicine. Wojcicki is the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Conference co-chairman Jose Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos of Pfizer will discuss the companys Centers of Therapeutic Innovation, which unite scientists from academia with Pfizer drug hunters in order to translate novel ideas into efficient medicines.

Pfizer, which has research units in Kendall Square, currently has CTIs in San Diego, New York and Boston that work with 23 academic medical centers, including nine in the Hub.

Gutierrez-Ramos, Pfizers senior vice president and head of biotherapeutics research and development, said another goal of the conference is to generate more entrepreneurs from the venture capital world or Big Pharma who can focus on drug development for the long-term.

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Unclogging the drug pipeline