University of Illinois

Speeches and statements

Midwest Life Sciences: Forging a Cooperative Biotech Strategy for Success

Keynote speech to the Illinois Biotechnology Industry Organization (iBIO) Industry Expo and Marketplace
February 20, 2008

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Larry Schook dreamed up this map of the biotech world. He's a University of Illinois professor of comparative genomics, a former iBIO board member and a researcher at our Institute for Genomic Biology. That's the IGB in the foreground.

You'll notice the IGB is on Interstate 57 connecting it and the U of I's Urbana-Champaign campus to Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

You'll also note that the map shows the West and East coast biotech centers floating off into the ocean. The point is that we in the Midwest don't have to wish we were on the Peninsula or overlooking the Charles River to be a biotech center. We already possess deep expertise and plentiful resources to develop all of the principal areas of biotech:

• agriculture and bio-energy
• climate and environment
• drug discovery and biotech-based therapeutics

The U of I brings to the table deep interdisciplinary research expertise, state-of-the-art facilities, and unparalleled computational capabilities. Equally important, we have entrepreneurial resources, curriculum and attitude.

Or, to quote a very popular Illinois presidential candidate, when it comes to building the bio-industry here in our state, I say, "Yes we can!"

In my remarks this morning, I want to give you just a glimpse of why I make that claim from a U of I perspective.

We just dedicated the IGB last March. It's a wonderful place — a $75 million, 186,000 square foot dedicated interdisciplinary research facility. The total population of the IGB is 350, including 130 faculty members from 30 disciplines.

The IGB has a cluster of core facilities that include a microscopy suite, a plant-growth facility, a bioanalytical facility and a microfabrication laboratory.

The question Larry Schook's IGB interdisciplinary research team is answering is this: How can genomic information lead to treatments for chronic health problems such as diabetes and osteo-and rheumatoid arthritis? Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, the aim is to create custom therapeutics that improve patients' own regenerative powers.

Larry's research team epitomizes a great deal of the U of I's biotech effort:

• It's interdisciplinary.
• It takes place in state-of-the-art facilities.
• It relies on robust computational infrastructure.
• It's externally funded — part of the $650 million in research grants and contracts won by our faculty each year.
• It's multi-institutional.
• And, its discoveries make life better.

Larry's team also is multi-institutional. Researchers come from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern and the local Carle Foundation Hospital as well as iCyt Visionary Science, an Urbana-based biotech startup in our research park.

A surprising research theme at IGB is the business, economics and law of genomic biology. It's known locally as BioBEL (for business, economics and law, of course) and is made up of U of I economists, business and law school professors working with scientists and technology experts. This is unheard of at a scientific research center. Harris Lewin, the IGB's director, says: "Nobody has business and law embedded in a life-sciences building."

Nobody except the U of I.

But you know that BioBEL is vital in high-tech fields like genomic biology. Navigating business, legal and economic issues in the global economy is as important as the laboratory innovations. The Institute for Genomic Biology's ambitious charge is to explore and find answers to the pressing biotech and societal issues in human health, agriculture, the environment and energy use and production.

If you went in search of the interdisciplinary culture that engendered the IGB, your next stop would be the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. The Beckman Institute celebrates its 20th birthday next year. It is named after our alumnus, the late Arnold Beckman, who was an inventor and entrepreneur.

Talks for the interdisciplinary research center began back in 1983, when a chemist and vice chancellor for research, Ted Brown, circulated a memo that floated the idea of a facility to break down the barriers among sciences and take an interdisciplinary approach to research. This was a radical idea at the time. Arnold Beckman and his wife Mabel gave more than $50 million toward the effort. The State of Illinois also contributed and Beckman became a reality.

Today, Beckman has more than 600 researchers from 30 University of Illinois departments, including psychology, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, physics, chemistry, physiology, bioengineering and biochemistry.

The Beckman Institute is home to both basic research and applications. Physicist Pierre Wiltzius is the Institute's director. Pierre was the director of semiconductor research at Bell Laboratories for 17 years. He says the Beckman Institute's research is "where the physical sciences and engineering intersect with the life sciences."

Wiltzius says that, "Working in the broad area of imaging and bio-imaging is our strength. The NIH term 'translational research' means applying engineering and the physical sciences to images. We believe this will have a huge impact in biomedical applications, clinical medicine and surgery."

The Beckman Institute is building on the MRI work of the Urbana campus' Paul Lauterbur who shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2003 for 'seminal discoveries concerning the use of nuclear magnetic resonance to visualize different structures' such as molecules, solutions and solids. I'm proud to note that Dr. Lauterbur is one of twenty-two Nobel Prize winners with direct ties to the University of Illinois.

Biocomputation and bioinformatics have deep roots at Beckman and the U of I thanks to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. They have made possible revolutionary advancements in genome sequencing, DNA and cellular biololgy.

The NCSA is the next stop on the interdisciplinary bio Urbana campus tour. One of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program, NCSA opened in 1986. NCSA made a big splash early on with Mosaic, the first widely used graphical-interface Internet browser.

Computation has joined observation and experimentation as an integral part of the scientific process and added modeling and simulation to the scientist's tool kit. Through modeling and simulation, scientists and engineers can "see" beyond the reach of the most sensitive observational instruments. Applications of modeling and simulation range from how the human body functions at the molecular level to how the universe evolved in the moments after the Big Bang to how atmospheric forces create deadly storms.

Cyberinfrastructure is said to be the Digital Age equivalent of the Interstate Highway System. Just as the network of high-speed roadways accelerates travel and commerce, cyberinfrastructure accelerates innovation and discovery.

Here's an example of what NCSA allows our scientists to do: A recent simulation of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus is the first computer simulation of an entire life form at the level of atomic detail. Previously, all-atom molecular dynamics simulations on such a large structure wouldn't have been feasible.

The simulations of the tobacco mosaic virus involved a million atoms and simulation times on the order of 50 nanoseconds. This required massive amounts of computing time.

"This is on the highest end of what is feasible today," says U of I physicist Klaus Schulten. "The approach is something that we learned from engineers: Reverse engineer the subjects you're interested in and test fly them in the computer to see if they work in silico the way they do in vivo. Naturally, deeper understanding of the mechanistic properties of other, more complicated viruses will eventually contribute to public health and medicine."

NCSA cyberinfrastructure will become even more muscular when Blue Waters, the $208 million IBM supercomputer that is 500 times faster than today's supercomputers, boots up in 2011 on the Urbana campus. This "petascale" system, funded by the NSF and announced in July, will make arithmetic calculations at a sustained rate in excess of 1,000-trillion operations per second (or a "petaflop" per second).

Blue Waters will enable the next generation of science and engineering applications — those that use multiple models at multiple scales to describe natural and engineered events and systems, such as modeling cells, organs and organisms.

Through NCSA's Private Sector Program, business and industry can benefit from the center's high-tech innovations and problem-solving expertise in high-performance computing, data management and analysis, visualization, cybersecurity and advanced IT.

Some of the world's leading companies use NCSA tools and technologies to gain competitive advantage. Current partners include: ACNielsen, Boeing, Caterpillar, John Deere, Dell, ExxonMobil, IBM, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Motorola, Rolls-Royce and State Farm. Please note the surprising absence of bio companies. This is an opportunity waiting to be seized.

Here in Chicago, the Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC) is a great example of interdisciplinary, multi-institutional biomedical research. The consortium is a research collaboration of medical scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Chicago and Northwestern. The CBC, established in 2002, is funded by the Searle Funds at the Chicago Community Trust at $5 million per year for five years beginning in 2006. It will be reviewed in 2010 and if all progresses as planned, Searle will provide another $5 million per year for five more years, bringing total funding to $50 million. In addition to research, CBC recruits biomedical researchers and leaders and promotes the development of the biomedical industry in Chicago.

Brenda Russell is a UIC professor of physiology and biophysics. She is the leader and liaison of the CBC at UIC. She says that in addition to retaining our human capital here in the Midwest, we need to keep biotech start-ups angel and VC capital here.

Russell thinks iBIO is the right kind of organization at the right time for Midwest bio. She describes iBIO as "very practical," helping to build a regional biotech community. Academic researchers and industry people, both established big pharma outfits and startups, "get used to working together so interactions aren't from-the-ground-up, start-up agreements every time."

Another UIC asset is the College of Pharmacy, regularly ranked in the top 10 nationally for doctoral programs and NIH research funding.

The College of Pharmacy has a number of research centers:

• The Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology does interdisciplinary and multi-institutional research using small drug molecules with cellular targets leading to new drug discovery.

• Other College of Pharmacy centers are the Program for Collaborative Research in Pharmaceutical Science, the Drug Information Group, the Pharmacogenomics Lab and the Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research.

The next stop is IllinoisVENTURES, LLC with offices in the Chicago Loop and the University of Illinois' Chicago and Urbana-Champaign campuses. This university-affiliated venture capital firm has $40 million under management and has raised $200 million in third-party co-investment.

IllinoisVENTURES is a seed and early-stage technology investment firm that specializes in research-based companies in information technologies and the physical sciences and life sciences. IllinoisVENTURES has a particular emphasis on start-ups built on U of I research and that of other Midwest universities and federal laboratories.

IllinoisVENTURES CEO and managing director John Banta says the U of I is "the dominant indigenous biotech asset in the Midwest." iCyt, which I noted earlier, is an IllinoisVENTURES company based on technology from the Urbana campus.

Kathryn Burrer Hyer handles IllinoisVENTURES' life sciences portfolio. One of her companies, SteadySleep Rx, based on UIC technology, is developing therapeutics for sleep apnea.

Hyer and IllinoisVENTURES help bio-companies fill the huge intermediate area between discovery and market success with scientific and management personnel and support. This includes funding, regulatory consultation, intellectual property, patent and licensing support, business strategy, recruiting management talent and any other support called for by the start-up and situation.

In Hyer's view, all the essential elements — "profound research, facilities, medical schools, talent, capital, public-private partnerships and collaborations"— are present for biotech to make a much bigger bang in Chicago and the Midwest.

IllinoisVENTURES is overseen by Avijit Ghosh, recently named as U of I vice president for technology and economic development. Avijit was previously dean of our College of Business in Urbana. He's responsible for technology commercialization and economic development for the U of I system. He's also the principal of the University's limited-liability companies and director of our research parks.

To give you a sense of the scope of the U of I's IP activity, our Urbana and Chicago campuses in 2006 earned licensing revenue and patent activity of more than $10 million. Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Northwestern and Minnesota of the Big Ten also earned more than $10 million, with Minnesota earning the most at $56 million in licensing revenue and patents in 2006. (Source: "U.S. Licensing Activity Survey: FY 2006" by the Association of University Technology Managers)

Nationally, there was a record number of startup companies by university researchers in 2006. The U of I formed nine companies, made 157 new patent applications, was issued 41, and executed 80 licenses and options, bringing our total licenses to 354.

Back to the biotech map, another interdisciplinary "theme" team at the Institute for Genomic Biology is the Energy Biosciences Institute, a collaborative effort of the U of I at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Berkeley. It's financed by a 10-year, $500 million grant from global energy giant BP. The U of I is dedicating 340 acres of farmland to the study of corn crop residues, switchgrass, Miscanthus (which is a hybrid perennial grass that can grow to 13 feet tall) and other perennial plants as biofuel sources.

The BP grant is one of the largest corporate commitments ever made to higher education institutions. The company and the universities pounded out creative ground rules for dealing with the intellectual property that comes out of the grant. We accomplished this in six months, warp speed when dealing with the line-by-line legalisms of intellectual-property agreements.

Historically, stumbling blocks to corporate-academic partnerships are that their cultures, goals and even calendars are so different. The BP-U of I-Berkeley agreement shows what can be done when the potential value of the mutual benefit is great.

The U of I has an excellent medical school at UIC. We graduate more physicians than any medical school in the country. The UIC also has well-regarded colleges of dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, public health and applied health sciences.

You'd expect our flagship Urbana campus to be among the top 50 universities in federal R&D expenditures. And it is. You might be surprised that UIC checks in at No. 47 with about $204 million (much of it for medical research) in federal research funds in 2006.

Finally I'd like to talk about our 70,000 students and about entrepreneurism as a campus trend that is coming into full bloom at the U of I. In 2004, the U of I's Urbana campus won a $4.5 million Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation grant to establish the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership. By the 2006-07 school year, 115 Urbana faculty were teaching entrepreneurial thinking — and not just in the business college. There are entrepreneurially based classes in everything from architecture and computer science to law, theater and veterinary medicine. We had 2,700 undergrads, 500 master's degree and 600 doctoral students enrolled in these courses.

The entrepreneurship programs at Urbana and Chicago are ranked in the top 25 by both The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine. We're proud of that. To offer you just one example, SanoGene Therapeutics, Inc., a start-up venture founded by two UIC MBA graduates marketing UIC-licensed technology for a new brain cancer therapy, won the top $50,000 prize in the first statewide business plan competition in 2006.

To conclude, I'd like you to consider this talk as an invitation to join us at the U of I. We've built the biotech research infrastructure. We have intellectual and human capital — researchers, students and entrepreneurs. We are great at discovery in both basic science and applications. We have state-of-the-art facilities and computational infrastructure. We are experienced at working across disciplinary boundaries. We are getting better at working with other institutions and companies. We have the capacity to locate and grow new biotech companies.

We're think we're already at the center of the biotech world. We'd love for you to join us for mutual benefit.

And, just in case you get lost, now you have a map.

Thank you very much.