Med school research confronts new funding landscape | New Orleans CityBusiness
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Med school research confronts new funding
landscape
POSTED: 10:17 AM Wednesday, October 10, 2012
BY: Mason Harrison, Contributing Writer
TAGS: Bayh- Dole Act, Gene D'Amour, Health Sciences Center , Intellectual Property, John Christie, Louisiana State
University, medical school, research, Steve Nelson, Tulane University, Xavier University
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Public dollars to support academic research are becoming harder to come by as fiscal
hawks in Washington, D.C., and a growing federal budget deficit winnow the amount of
money available for colleges and universities. The new realities are leading school
administrators to find innovative ways to support their scientific endeavors.
Such is the case at the three New
Orleans schools that specialize in
training medical professionals. In
addition to supplying the work force,
the medical schools at Louisiana State
University Health Sciences Center and
Tulane University and the pharmacy
school at Xavier University are also
churning out the commodity of
intellectual property.
And with the financial landscape of
health care shifting toward efficiencies
and measurable results, money
available for research has undergone
comparable changes.
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Rhonda Martinez, a research associate with Louisiana
State University Health Sciences Center, isolates and
cultures bone marrow cells. (photo by Frank Aymami)
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“The pool of dollars that we compete
for every year has remained the same while the number of institutions seeking funding
from the federal government continues to grow,” said John Christie, who leads the Office
of Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property at Tulane University. “The budget for (the
National Institutes of Health) has remained flat for about the past decade and so the pie
has not grown any bigger.”
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Coming up with ways to underwrite research programs has always been a full-time job,
Christie said, but now the effort has an added sense of urgency.
“We’re not exactly sure how to go about securing increased funding, and this is
something that we are trying to figure out because the traditional routes are not working,”
he said.
Those traditional routes largely have involved soliciting government agencies interested in
supporting scientific work. More recently, partnering with industry and companies with
deep pockets has taken on new significance for schools throughout the country and has
caused academics to retool their
outreach efforts to the private sector.
“The thing about industry is that we
don’t find them, they find us,” said
Gene D’Amour, senior vice president
for resource development at Xavier
University.
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Med school research confronts new funding landscape | New Orleans CityBusiness
Xavier’s marketable research — and
the potential for partnerships — when
the university’s professors are
published in academic and trade
journals or present their findings at
conferences, he said. And rather than
move past schools that successfully
have linked with business resources,
fiscal belt-tightening has not
discouraged government entities from contributing to academic research.
“In fact, it’s quite the opposite,” D’Amour said. “Federal agencies are happy to see that
your work is being supported by private industry because it indicates that the work you’re
doing is valued and needed.”
Dr. Steve Nelson, dean of the LSU Health Sciences Center School of Medicine, said schools
must be proactive in building relationships with sources that can fund on-campus
research. The university has forged alliances with this goal in mind and works with the
New Orleans BioDistrict to promote its research, he said.
Fostering those connections can be beneficial to a university’s bottom line, with LSU and
Xavier bringing in $50 million and $25 million a year, respectively, from outside sources
to support its research activities.
“Ninety percent of the money we receive to support our research comes from outside of
the university,” D’Amour said, which helps to cover a variety of overhead costs linked to
scientific research.
But landing grant money for academic research is not the only financial benefit schools
receive. The chance to commercialize the results of successful research is a perennial
possibility and is not lost on administrators examining funding streams from the public
and private sectors.
Christie said the game-changer for research-based institutions was the Bayh-Dole Act,
approved in 1980. Before its approval, the federal government would own the patent on
any research developments it helped fund.
“But the government had no incentive to do anything with these patents and they would
just sit there,” he said. “Under the act, universities are allowed to hold the patents and
benefit financially from their research. The law was designed to create jobs and that is
exactly what it has done.”
But D’Amour said commercializing their academic findings is merely a “consequence of
what we do” and not the “primary goal” of researchers, while acknowledging that today’s
fiscal climate makes monetizing its academic products a key part of finding ways to
sustain future scientific programs.
“The reality right now is that it is essential to find ways to place these developments on
the market, but doing so is simply and added value,” he said.
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