Research institutes getting down to business

When the Translational Genomics Research Institute announced last week that it mapped the genetic makeup of a type of plague, it was one step for science.

Jodie Snyder
The Arizona Republic

It was also one step for the non-profit’s business plan.

In partnership with the Arizona Board of Regents, TGen filed a patent in hopes of protecting a discovery that it hopes can be used to create diagnostic tests.

Patenting scientific progress is a phenomenon now being considered by other well-known Valley research institutions. Increasingly, scientists have to know their way around a financial statement as well as their own labs.

Not that scientists are strangers to finance. The idea that researchers are oblivious to money is old-fashioned and mostly wrong, researchers say.

"We are already entrepreneurial," said Dr. Joseph Rogers, president and senior scientist at Sun Health Research Institute.

The institute, which studies aging and age-related diseases, has 22 M.D. and Ph.D. investigators and a $5 million research budget.

Dr. Joan Rankin Shapiro, head of research for St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, agrees.

"Our researchers either have a grant or they don’t have a job," she said.

St. Joseph’s, the site of Barrow Neurological Institute, has a research budget of about $12 million, mostly from federal, state and foundation grants.

More and more, researchers are looking at funding sources other than highly competitive federal grants. The National Institutes of Health funds only about 19 percent of applications, Shapiro said.

That means researchers are increasingly interested in different models such as corporate partnerships, contract work and patent royalties. This heightened interest comes as newcomer TGen works to commercialize its discoveries, and Arizona universities are encouraging researchers to do more work that could have financial payoffs.

In the past, very few research centers made money from commercialization, Rogers said. Drug companies used to pick up most of the profits, but researchers have gotten savvier.

"It’s making us better businesspeople," Rogers said.

Sun Health may patent any future discoveries if doing so could help patients faster, Rogers said.

Created in 1987, Sun Health has a strong connection to the Sun Cities, whose residents have donated everything from dollars to their brains for the institute’s internationally known brain bank. Rogers doesn’t think they will object if it decides to consider commercial ventures. The area has many retired businesspeople who appreciate the economics of research, he said.

The Mayo Foundation, on the other hand, is an old hand at the business of science.

Mayo Medical Ventures, started more than a decade ago, is part of three groups that provided $30 million for Mayo’s education and research programs in 2002. The medical ventures division, based in Rochester, Minn., handles discoveries made at all three Mayo sites, including the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale.

Dr. Laurence Miller, director of Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale’s cancer center and research program, encourages the clinic’s physicians to do research but draws the line at letting them create spin-off companies.

"It would be a conflict of interest," he said. "They cannot own a company, but their technology can be sold or shared."

One Mayo physician has a patent on an artificial knee device, but many other patents from Scottsdale involve basic biochemistry and molecular biology.

The Scottsdale site gets about $6 million in research funds and hopes to expand its 80,000-square-foot research site, which has nine principal investigators, Miller said.

One of the largest research institutions in the Valley, St. Joseph’s, has a different take on its research.

It draws about $500,000 to $1 million per year from royalties from its researchers, much of it from devices, screws and plates invented by Barrow researchers.

It also has developed some more creative partnerships, Shapiro said.

One researcher recently decided to relinquish rights to a discovery so he could get corporate funding to support his lab at the hospital, she said.

But the Catholic hospital draws the line at some financial arrangements, namely patenting genes.

"We have a very strong feeling we shouldn’t make money on your genes," Shapiro said.

In deciding to patent its first discovery, TGen considered the science, patent enforceability and the potential business market, said Ron King, head of TGen’s technology transfer program.

It takes up to $125,000 to get a patent, and TGen wants to make sure it is justified.

The group realizes it’s a thin and sometimes wavering line between science and commerce. TGen wants to publish its findings to spur other research but it also wants to protect its financial discoveries, especially as it develops its own tests, King said.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0707research07.html