Biomedical research institute planned
A group of Spokane-area business, government and higher-education leaders have unveiled plans to launch a private biomedical research institute to compete for world-class researchers and develop high-paying jobs.
Titled the Institute for Systems Medicine, the concept is still in the formative stage and has no staff and no operating budget. A steering committee of about 15 people have looked at the idea and now want to generate community discussion of the plan.
“We have general agreement, but now the work we need is clarifying the relationship among the participants,” said Lewis Rumpler, who coordinates the steering committee’s efforts.
Until December, Rumpler had been CEO of Spokane economic development group INTEC.
Rumpler and others involved in the concept say the goal is a privately managed research center that capitalizes on the growing fields of nanotechnology, specialized diagnoses of diseases and advances in health care.
The idea first arose in Spokane nearly two years ago when Seattle scientist Dr. Leroy Hood announced he would assist Gonzaga University in developing a biomedical research center.
Hood is president of the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology, which was to serve as general model for a similar idea in Spokane.
His Seattle center has become noted worldwide for attracting scientists and winning significant grants to conduct advanced research on diagnosing and treating disease.
Since the Gonzaga announcement Hood has agreed to serve more as a consultant and not as a key partner. In addition, the concept moved to a wider community focus, said Hood.
“The idea has evolved since the first announcement,” Hood said about the Spokane plan. “What matters is that all the key players in the community are together and behind this; it doesn’t matter whether it’s based at Gonzaga or not,” he said.
The planners say they’re basing the project on collaboration among the area’s universities, the hospitals and other providers of health care services in the region.
“If you look at what is unique here, it’s our focus on health care,” Rumpler said. He said the strategy for growth is to recruit a top-level scientist to be the institute’s director, then bring in research grants and eventually more researchers.
That task will be daunting, requiring about $30 million to put the institute into motion and more than $100 million over the next 10 years. Part of that cost would be to construct an institute building for staff and researchers.
Skip Davis, CEO of Providence Health Care, which operates Sacred Heart Medical Center, said the concept could produce both “an accelerator for more research and a catalyst for economic development.”
The next task will be defining the structure of the center and developing a business plan to keep it running, said Rumpler.
Providing consulting help to accomplish those goals is PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he said. The global accounting firm has a health sciences practice division specifically to help with projects like this, said Rumpler.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers will be paid, eventually, “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for the work, Rumpler added.
That money will come from $750,000 raised so far from private and government sources, he said. Of that, $250,000 comes from Spokane County, which approved planning funds for the institute in December.
The steering committee also points to the quick success seen so far with a comparable effort in Phoenix. Officials there, starting in 2002, raised more than $90 million to create the Translational Genomics Research Center, or TGen.
TGen is credited with delivering a significant increase in biomedical research to the Phoenix area. During 2005 its research teams landed more than $24 million to study and develop new ways to treat disease.
If raising large sums of money is a challenge, Davis of Providence Health Care said it’s time for Spokane to think big.
“We have to take a broader vision. We’re burdened by our history to think we can’t do something like this.
“But we need a future view of Spokane. As we’ve seen with the developments going on in the area and in downtown Spokane, other people have begun to have a keen interest in our region.”
Davis said the institute is not a quick fix for the region’s economy.
“This involves a 12- to 15-year timeline,” he said.
He said he had initial doubts about finding $30 million with the intent to raise even more.
But the PriceWaterhouseCoopers team told him that the TGen example in Phoenix, and similar efforts elsewhere, show that cities like Spokane can catch up and participate successfully in biotech research.
“They told us, if you can get this institute seeded (and funded) to the right point, then there are larger amounts of regional and national money they are confident will come,” said Davis.