Big Plans for Small Science on Arkansas Medical News Inc.

Big Plans for Small Science

By: STEVE BRAWNER

UAMS Planning Nanotech-themed Park

When Michael Douglas, PhD, director of the UAMS Arkansas BioVentures program, looks across Interstate 630 to the south side of Little Rock, he doesn’t just see an aging neighborhood and an economically depressed area. He sees an opportunity to change Little Rock and the field of medicine.

Douglas is helping spearhead an effort to build a 30-acre research park that will focus on nanotechnology and be one of the most important regional economic engines in recent history.

The project’s first phase will cost $51 million and result in a four-story, 100,000-square-foot building along with the infrastructure and site development that will enable the area eventually to host more than a million square feet of research space. He hopes to see construction by 2014. Best-case scenario: no debt thanks to funding from the federal government, a still-sought after private donor, and other sources, including a possible temporary tax referendum.

The park has formed its research park authority, the independent entity recognized by the state that will govern the park and have the ability to issue bonds and participate in imminent domain activities. It has incorporated and created a board of directors.

Douglas said planners hope the final site will be within five minutes’ drive of UAMS, Children’s Hospital and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, three research entities that, along with the city, are sponsoring the project. Three sites are being recommended, though a final decision has not yet been made.

The goal is to create an innovation cluster focusing on the rapidly growing field of nanotechnology, the science that deals with materials the size of a nanometer – one-billionth of a meter, or one ten-thousandth the size of a red blood cell. How big is this small science? Lux Research, a technology consulting firm, says the worldwide value of nanomanufactured goods will rise from $147 billion in 2007 to $3.1 trillion by 2015.

Douglas expects UAMS, Children’s, and UALR, along with the National Center for Toxicological Research in Pine Bluff, to combine their abilities to give Arkansas a footprint in this rapidly growing sector.

“It’s actually quite an interesting sort of mix of what we have here in central Arkansas,” Douglas said. “I think we’ve got something that we can actually put our imprimatur on as unique.”

Northwest Arkansas also is creating a presence in nanotechnology with private businesses and the University of Arkansas’ Nanoscale Material Science and Engineering Building, but unlike the Little Rock research park, the region has not focused on using that technology for medicine. A company known as NanoMech is developing coating materials for industrial cutting tools, producing industrial lubricants, and making other products that are hitting the market.

BioVentures was created 12 years ago to help push technologies created at UAMS into the marketplace, so it has both a medical and an economic mission. Douglas said the research park will be the biggest new economic generator in central Arkansas outside the Port of Little Rock, though he warns that, “This is not going to develop overnight. This is going to take a while.”

Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Jay Chessir also compared it to the port, which he said grew slowly after it was created 30 years ago and then began rapidly developing five years ago. “It would be the most significant economic generator that we as a community and a region could do to impact the next 30 years,” Chessir said.

Planners started working on the idea in early 2005 before Douglas came to Little Rock from Washington University in St. Louis. According to Chessir, the work started with a Technology Park Committee led by Little Rock real estate manager Dickson Flake. Enabling legislation was passed in 2007 and amended during this year’s legislative session. Supporters raised $100,000 for a consultant study that presented its recommendations in 2009.

Douglas said once the first building is up and research begins, much of the rest of the park will begin to be filled by private developers.

For Douglas, this would be a natural extension for BioVentures. Working from an on-campus business incubator facility which itself is undergoing an expansion, Douglas patents intellectual capital developed at UAMS and finds developers able to take it to market. Because the research was done on public property, it belongs to the University of Arkansas system, but the researcher receives half the royalties while the system receives the other half.

Royalties now total a little more than $1 million per year, but a lot of products are still in the pipeline. Douglas said a rule of thumb is that the university should bring in 5 percent of its research expenditures – about $100 million per year.

BioVentures often sells its products to large companies, but part of its mission is to develop jobs locally like the ones that would be created at the research park. Douglas works with some of the region’s most important business leaders and often recruits retired businessmen who have networks of contacts. “I drag a lot of gray-hairs up here from Hot Springs that are tired of playing bridge and golf and want to spend a few days a week managing a small business,” he said.

So far, the company has started about 47 companies and is managing a portfolio of about 25 companies. It has generated a little more than 500 jobs in the central Arkansas area with a payroll of $26.5 million last year.

According to Douglas, obtaining patents is the key to making sure that the hard work of UAMS’s researchers eventually makes it to market. Without those patents, he said, the intellectual property would remain just that – intellectual. “Those would never be developed if we didn’t sort of capture the value in an intellectual asset, a patent, and then essentially sell that patent to a pharma company,” he said. “If they can’t control that asset, they won’t invest in it.”

That means he is in a never-ending race with his own researchers, who sometimes don’t think to contact him before publishing their work, which removes the opportunity to file for a patent. He walks the halls and attends department meetings to keep his finger on the researchers’ pulse and remind them of their academic duty to file a patent application for their work. Sometimes the race goes right to the finish line. Recently, UAMS’ copyright committee decided to move forward on patenting a discovery during a Friday afternoon meeting that ended at 3:30 p.m. Thirty minutes later they learned that the research would be published the following Monday. The manuscript was delivered to the patent attorney, and it was submitted as a provisional patent in time.

“The sacrosanct rule is we don’t delay publication at all,” he said. “Publication is the lifeline for these investigators, and we can’t get in the way of that. There is some stuff that gets published that we would have liked to have, and we just either didn’t get to it in time, or the investigator didn’t think it was important enough to tell us about it.”