Dr.
Matthew J. Kluger loves talking about the walls that have been erected to house
the Medical College of Georgia Life Sciences Business Development Center.But he’s just as excited about the walls that have come tumbling down.
The ivory towers that once symbolically sequestered higher education from the larger community are crumbling nationwide, including at MCG-- a deconstruction project that Dr. Kluger enthusiastically applauds.
“Society has changed,” says Dr. Kluger, vice president for research and dean of the MCG School of Graduate Studies. “I think we can never go back to having a wall separating a university from the community.”
Until the Life Sciences Business Development Center opened last spring, MCG’s research community had a largely tenuous connection to the business world. The researchers’ job was to make discoveries. If those discoveries yielded marketable products, techniques or services, the researchers generally had to leave academia if they chose to pursue commercialization. Likewise, the corporate world had little access to MCG laboratories cultivating potentially marketable innovations in health care.
“What Dr. Kluger brought to MCG when he came on board five years ago was an organized technology transfer program,” says Dr. Michael G. Gabridge, associate vice president of technology transfer and economic development at MCG.
“We didn’t have a vigorous way of evaluating whether intellectual property was worth patenting,” says Dr. Kluger, whose credentials include a Ph.D. and M.B.A. “MCG researchers didn’t have the opportunity to set up their own small companies to market their discoveries.”
Dr. Kluger says MCG is now a leader nationwide in cultivating the complementary nature of business and science. “We’re ahead of the curve in many respects,” he says.
The Life Sciences Business Development Center, which adjoins the Interdisciplinary Research Building, consists of five major laboratory suites. Small biomedical businesses may apply to rent a suite, garnering access to a wealth of MCG resources and expertise. Likewise, if MCG researchers make a marketable discovery, they now have a ready pathway into the business world--without leaving their day jobs behind.
“To have a world-class research enterprise, you need to create an environment where faculty entrepreneurs want to stay here or move here,” Dr. Kluger says. “And to have a thriving economy, we need to optimize our biomedical brain trust. Roughly every million dollars of research creates about 15 new jobs. As you grow research, you grow the need for accountants, for janitors for more of everything it takes to run a company.”
The reverberations trickle exponentially, which is why many segments of the community and state have enthusiastically contributed their support. The Georgia Research Alliance, for instance, provided $5 million toward construction of the Life Sciences Business Development Center. OneGeorgia, a state initiative that uses a portion of tobacco settlement money to create infrastructure in non-metropolitan Georgia, provided a $500,000 grant to the Georgia Medical Center Authority to equip the center.
“These
funds make our facility one of the best-equipped in the Southeast, and perhaps
the nation,” says Dr. Gabridge, who points with pride to resources such as
“clean space” in each lab that ensures an area free of all environmental
contaminants when working with biological materials. “Entrepreneurs are going to
find Augusta an ideal place to start up a new life-sciences company.”
Dr. Kluger chairs the Georgia Medical Center Authority Board of Directors and works closely with its executive director, Lenie Roos-Gabridge, who offers an outside-in perspective for the Life Sciences Business Development Center. One of her roles includes cultivating an Augusta research park to offer a second level for fledgling biomedical businesses to move to as they grow.
“We present potential companies with a shopping list of benefits that we offer,” says Dr. Gabridge. For instance, each company will be assigned an advisory board, a pool of biomedical business experts to offer counsel and analysis. Stephen P. Henderson, assistant director of the center, has an extensive business background that will ensure the best interests both of MCG and of the companies.
“We’re not a passive landlord,” says Dr. Gabridge. “We’ll map out the milestones the companies plan to achieve and we will hold them to task. We want to make sure they are likely to succeed.”
He cites checks and balances including assessments of companies’ past performance, analyses to gauge the marketability of potential products and services and ongoing oversight to ensure that goals are met. Businesses that apply to rent space in the center submit a business plan to the center’s Admissions Committee, which makes recommendations to a 20-member Board of Advisors chaired by MCG President Daniel W. Rahn and co-chaired by Dr. Kluger.
“The
business’ goals must be consistent with MCG’s overall philosophy,” Dr. Gabridge
says. “If the committee isn’t happy with the fit, we’ll say no thanks.” But he
and his colleagues are excited about the potential to optimize disease treatment
and enhance quality of life with products and services emanating from the
center.
The first tenant company, a pathology service business with a solid track record of working with physicians, moved into the center this spring. In a further boon to the technology-transfer initiative, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue in February announced the creation of a Life Science Innovation Center in Augusta, the fourth in the state’s Centers of Innovation program, which Dr. Gabridge will direct. The designation will yield about $150,000 a year for three years to help with outreach and marketing of the Life Sciences Business Development Center.
MCG’s partnership with the business community is well-timed to capitalize on the massive growth of the university’s research initiative. Since coming on board five years ago, Dr. Kluger has overseen an increase in extramural research funding from $25 million to approximately $85 million.
The university is concentrating its efforts in five thematic areas—cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes/obesity, infection/inflammation and neurological disease—and has created an environment that fosters multidisciplinary research and collaboration. MCG has created 13 core laboratories that advance scientific studies campuswide and beyond. These labs, including those devoted to genomics, cell production and cell imaging, reflect the cutting-edge nature of research that is yielding groundbreaking findings related to conditions such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and aging.
Many research projects are already on the fast track toward commercialization, including the pursuit of patents on transporter technology that shows promise for longevity and weight control.
The Life Sciences Business Development Center administrators know their lofty goals will take time to mature. But like a scientist who trusts that great things will spring from careful, methodical work, the administrators have equal measures of patience and ambition. “This is a long-term proposition,” says Dr. Kluger. “If you look at Augusta five years from now, you might see six or eight new companies—impressive in and of itself. But it’s the environment we’re setting the stage for 20 years from now that will really show the effects.”
--Christine Hurley Deriso
