The pharmaceutical industry has long known that ∼80% of the results of academic laboratories cannot be reproduced when repeated in industry laboratories. Yet academic investigators are typically unaware of this problem, which severely impedes the drug development process. This academic-industrial complication is not one of deception, but rather a complex issue related to how scientific research is carried out and translated in strikingly different enterprises. This Opinion describes the reasons for inconsistencies between academic and industrial laboratories and what can be done to repair this failure of translation.