Interesting. I'm guessing the pharma industry uses the term pre-clinical differently, I was just using it to mean anything that happens before clinical testing, which is how it's used in Wikipedia, Merriam-Websters, etc.
No, that's correct, pre-clinical is everything before actual clinical testing in humans.
However, pre-clinical has many phases, of which university research institutes only participate in the earlier ones.
Basic Research -> Lead -> Screen -> Hit -> Tox/ADME -> Formulation -> Phase I
I would argue that education research institutes only participate in the first four activities. It's very rare for them to work at all in the Tox/ADME and formulation phases, which are incredibly complex and require a lot of resources and expertise they don't have.
