Academia-industry collaborations in the discovery stage of the pharmaceutical research and development process have led to major scientific advances that have benefited patients significantly. Their rationale and challenges are well-documented, and models for such partnerships have been extensively described in the literature. However, downstream cooperation in the area of cancer clinical research remains poorly characterized. Furthermore, the complexity of translating evolutions in the field of oncology into concrete and meaningful results for patients necessitates new forms of collaboration between all relevant stakeholders. Although industry and independent academia can both be considered key actors in the anticancer drug development process, their objectives and underlying motivations may differ substantially. For example, whereas the former mainly performs pivotal trials for the purpose of achieving regulatory approval for their products, the latter strives to tackle research questions that clinicians are facing in real-world clinical practice. These diverging goals and motives give rise to tensions, which could undermine the advantages associated with setting up academia-industry partnerships in the clinical development of cancer treatments. There is a lack of information available on models of cooperation that are able to overcome these tensions and address the issues accompanying the rise of precision oncology. In this review, we set out to identify and outline both existing and novel models for collaboration in cancer clinical research among industry, academia, and, if applicable, other stakeholders from the perspective of an academic research organization (ARO), namely the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC). We also aimed to highlight key factors that have shaped the continuous transformation of the relationship between these actors in this field based on a detailed analysis of a number of EORTC-led clinical trials.