WSU venturing into pharmacogenomics

Washington State University is recruiting two genetics researchers to its Spokane campus to launch a $15 million research enterprise that will add 135 pharmaceutical scientists.

It’s a bold research and job-creation effort announced Monday that relies in part on leveraging a $1.2 million investment of local tax dollars with federal, state and private funds.

“These are people and projects that can be a real catalyst for Spokane,” said Susan Ashe, acting executive director of the Health Sciences & Services Authority of Spokane County.

Called the HSSA, the authority was established several years ago to capture a sliver of the local-option sales taxes collected in the Spokane area to help pay for projects designed to create a thriving research cluster here.

If successful, the projects will turn into either sustained research facilities that create jobs, or they will produce ideas or goods that can be commercialized.

Philip Lazarus, a professor and researcher at Penn State University’s College of Medicine, has been offered a position to erect a new academic and research program at WSU, a rare opportunity that WSU is dangling as a recruitment tool along with a generous financial package. The HSSA is contributing $500,000 over two years to help bring Lazarus to Spokane and set up his program.

“This is pretty exciting stuff. An opportunity in academic research to really create something with your stamp on it,” said Gary Pollack, WSU vice provost for health sciences.

Lazarus would work as WSU’s chair of pharmaceutical sciences at the Spokane campus starting in 2014.

His area of expertise is molecular genetics. Specifically, Lazarus is interested in pharmacogenomics. He would bring his independent, federally funded research program with him.

His research focuses on the genetic background of diseases and in particular how a person’s own genetic composition affects how that person responds to any certain drug.

“There has been just a tremendous amount of interest in what we call ‘personalized medicine,’ ” Pollack said. “If you know someone’s genetic background you can predict their acceptance of a certain drug. It allows us to pick the right drug, at the right dose, and choose the right route to maximize its effectiveness and get to the desired outcome.”

Pollack has already succeeded in hiring Michael Gibson, a professor at Michigan Technological University and chair of the school’s department of biological sciences, to come to WSU-Spokane.

His focus will be kick-starting a new program for drug development research called clinical translational sciences with the help of $200,000 in HSSA funds.

Pollack said the work is designed to help develop treatments for patients that use data gathered in animal research models.

It’s expensive, time-consuming work that has resulted in creating a bottleneck preventing new drugs from reaching the market.

“I perceive this to be a real opportunity for us. To plant our flag in the ground, so to speak,” Pollack said.

The research programs have been vetted for years by federal agencies such as the National Institutes for Health and the Food and Drug Administration, Ashe said.

The HSSA also gave WSU grants to buy laboratory equipment for its Spokane campus.

In a separate grant, the HSSA awarded $486,000 to Iasis Molecular Sciences, a Spokane company founded by Dave Vachon. The money will help Iasis work to develop antimicrobial additives to prevent or minimize the problem of infections – such as MRSA – that patients acquire at hospitals and clinics.