Science Market Update

OHSU received almost 4 times as many research grants than the next 2 universities on the list combined (University of Oregon received 64 research grants valued at 25.6 million, Oregon State University received 53 grants valued at 20.3 million).

Feeding the world's populace now and in the future is a major concern of the US Food & Drug Administration.  One way to increase the food supply is to eradicate diseases that ruin crops, and one of the most notorious of those diseases is late blight (of Irish Potato Famine infamy).  UC Riverside's Howard Judelson has been studying the fungus-like microbe that attacks potatoes and tomatoes for the past 20 years, 17 of those at UCR in the school's Center for Plant Cell Biology (CePCeB) as a plant pathologist.  Though competition was fierce for the FDA funding, Judelson was chosen to lead a nationwide team of researchers in a $9Million project to find a way to control the disease.  Of the $9M awarded, $4.3M is budgeted wholly to UCR.  Also on the team from CePCeB to sequence Phytophthora infestans is plant bioinformatics researcher Thomas Girke.

UC Riverside proudly announced the progress of its future medical school at a ceremony March 18 celebrating the completion of the research building.  The $36 Million research facility boasts 58,000 square feet and has won the LEED Silver designation for its green design: it will use only a third the energy of a typical lab.  But the real accomplishment of the new medical school will have less to do with its architecture and more to do with its purpose and vision.

Charlottesville may be home to the University of Virginia and no less than two research parks, but the big news in biotech development this week is that a former Coca-Cola bottling plant in town is being repurposed as state-of-the-art labs.  The company undertaking this feat is Indoor Biotechnologies, and they are expanding their presence in Charlottesville with the purchase of the Coca-Cola building, as well as opening opportunities for other biotech companies to lease space (including wet labs) in the 38,000 square foot facility.  The building has been rechristened the CityCampus Biotechnology Center, but it will probably always be the Coca-Cola plant to locals, who are very excited to see the familiar building take on new life.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is a research powerhouse that also knows how to turn its R into D, bringing technology to market, jobs to Wisconsin, and steady income back to the university through licensing agreements.

Relations between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the state's business sector have undergone a wholesale reversal from 30 years ago, when academic researchers were discouraged from starting up companies and the school's idea of a research park was a farm.  Today, Madison's University Research Park is a thriving business center, start-up incubator, and campus extension all in one.  And faculty are now actively encouraged to go into business, even given the resources to do so.  Intellectual licensing brings in a lot of money to the state, and companies bring jobs that pay well.

OHSU’s Oregon Center for Aging & Technology (also known as Orcatech) has received $3 Million in new funding from Intel Corp.  To collect and compile data that will help in understanding the onset of dementia and other aging ailments. The new Intel Funding, when coupled with the existing $12 Million in federal grants, will likely spur many lucrative research opportunities at OHSU.   

In the world of sustainable energy production and good environmental stewardship, Ohio is producing biogas from agricultural and food-processing waste through a successful partnership between the state university and business.  The Cleveland based Quasar Energy Group is working in collaboration with Ohio State's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) to turn 550,000 gallons of biomatter into energy at its flagship anaerobic digester at the OARDC's BioHio Research Park.

Ohio State University's Medical Center is undergoing a huge expansion and modernization effort with its ProjectOne $1Billion new medical facility.  Outdated buildings have been demolished and the concrete has been poured for the state-of-the-art Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute complex due to open in 2014.  ProjectOne is the largest development project in Ohio State's history and is expected to add $1.7 billion to Ohio’s economy.  Some of these gains will certainly include the purchasing of equipment, supplies and services for the medical center, as well as future gains through life science research funding and the commercialization of biomedical research discoveries.

If you're a business entrepreneur considering the University of Illinois' Research Park as a location for your start-up, you may stumble upon the micro-urban video above.  If you do, and the video does what it's supposed to, you'll want to relocate to the Champaign-Urbana area.  Because it is smart and innovative, fast-paced, young, brimming with movers and shakers, and your average commute time will be 14 minutes.

In fact, the Research Park and the micro-urban video are both efforts to link the university with the growing industrial research market that profits from its proximity to university resources and in turn offers job opportunities and tax revenues to the larger C-U community.

Universities have always been incubators for business development to some degree, and business parks that have sprung up in campus towns have been especially popular with start-ups.  What is new in the past decade is the development of research parks by the universities themselves, on university land, with clear links to the academic institution and even its business school.

The UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering was founded in 2001 with three faculty members.  It now has a faculty of 27 (with 5 more planned) and ranks impressively in the latest NSF Report on R&D Expenditures by major institutions.  According to Dept. Chair Athanasiou, UCD BME ranks:

In 2008, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, Keith Yamamoto, was asked to participate in a scientific consortium to present a report to Congress.  The topic of that report was The New Biology, and it was sponsored by NSF, NIH, and the DOE.  The consortium was known formally as the Committee on A New Biology for the 21st Century: Ensuring the United States leads the Coming Biology Revolution.  The report was presented to Congress in August, 2009 and is an extraordinarily forward-thinking plan to meet the challenges of supporting the planet in the 21st Century by applying scientific insights. (See press link below.)

Argonne National Lab and the University of Chicago are pooling their resources with the establishment of UC's new Institute for Molecular Engineering.  Researchers at the Institute will explore ways of fabricating and manipulating nanoscale structures to develop new technologies.  The germination of the Institute comes from years of molecular research in the basic sciences, both physical and biological, and the desire to craft solutions to real world problems from those scientific insights.  The new partnership will benefit not only from the resources of both the National Lab and the University of Chicago, but from the interdisciplinary nature of the Institute's approach to scientific problems.

Melissa Reynolds is a chemistry professor at Colorado State University at Ft. Collins, and what she's doing with biodegradable polymers could have profound effects for first responders in military conflicts or natural disasters. 

(Philadelphia skyline drawing with University buildings courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania)

Construction crews on Civic Center Blvd. at the University of Pennsylvania have been very busy the past few years, and now Penn Med has an impressive research facility that is filling fast.

In November of 2011 the new $145M Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building is set to open on the East Campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder.  LEED-certified, the building will be home to the Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biology (CIMB), which formed in 2003 to foster multidisciplinary molecular biotechnology research at CU.

Vice Chancellor for Research Joe G.N. Garcia had overall good news to announce in his Feb. 16, 2011 report on the state of research and funding at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  The most promising statistic is that UIC has turned a corner with regard to sponsored research funding: for the first time in five years, funding increased, from $347M to $412M for the fiscal year ending in 2010.  (The previous year had actually shown a decline.)

On February 22, 2011, Dean of the Duke University School of Medicine, Nancy Andrews, M.D., Ph.D., gave her State of the School Address.  Part 4 of that speech was devoted to Duke's "Commitment to Research Infrastructure."  The full text of that section of the speech is available in the transcription below, or on the original video. 

Radical building for a radical science.

UCSB's Center for Energy Efficient Materials (CEEM) was launched in August 2009 with $19million in funding from the Dept. of Basic Energy Sciences, a branch of the DOE. CEEM's mission is to help solve some of the world's most pressing energy problems, drawing on UCSB's strength in materials science research.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) was established in 2004 when Californians passed Prop 71, a statewide ballot measure allocating $3Billion to advance and support stem cell research at California universities and research institutions.