Opportunities

As an opening question, participants were asked to cite the most promising opportunities for the region’s biotech industry. There appears to be much to look forward to.

Joe Heppert, associate vice chancellor for research and graduate studies at KU’s Lawrence campus, sees great promise in translational science on his campus. Ideally, the research that chemists, biologists, and pharmacists are doing can be translated into cures, both human and animal. “We’re on the cusp of doing this about as well as anybody does in the country,” said Heppert.

“I think that it comes down to three things,” said John Garretson, who leads Shook Hardy & Bacon’s practice group to biotech. He cited “opportunity, money, and identifying and helping the entrepreneurial talent.” Garretson, who recently moved to the area from New York, found the more collegial environment here a welcome change from the “insular sort of mindset” that hampers research back east.

Robert Casillas, vice president of strategic life sciences and national security for MRIGlobal, sees “enhancing and strengthening our partnerships and collaboration” as a major opportunity for all regional players. “Those successes will pipeline in the talent,” said Casillas, “which is the human research talent that we’ll need to continue to grow.”

“There’s a lot of research to do. There are a number of start-up companies. There’s a momentum to this area,” said Patrick Woolley, chair of the science and technology group at Polsinelli. What the area lacks, however, are major investment funds, and this Woolley sees as a likely area of growth.

Dan Getman, president of the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute, pointed to three broad areas with growth potential: the animal-health corridor; translational research, particularly in the medical area; and the improvement in the venture capital environment, an example of which is Aratana Therapeutics.

This KCK-based animal health company recently completed a $15 million Series B financing deal, which brings the total capital raised to $31 million since Aratana was launched earlier in 2011. “They brought in some really top talent,” said Getman, “and it’s a very unique company.”

Jeff Boily, the CEO of the Center for Animal Health Innovation, agreed that one of the core strengths of the region was the animal-health corridor. The corridor—a swath that stretches from Manhattan in the west to Columbia in the east—includes companies that account for nearly 32 percent of total sales in the $19 billion global animal-health market. “I’m not sure everyone truly realizes how unique the corridor is,” said Boily. That much said, he recognized that the area falls short in the amount of investment capital available.

“What I see in this area,” said John Norton, the associate director of the UMKC Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, “is the opportunity to connect lots of intellectual property, lots of new knowledge to people who have the resources to develop the new knowledge commercially.”

Jeff Reene, chief operating officer of the KU Cancer Center, envisions three major growth opportunities. The first would be to grow the federal research-funding portfolio. The second, on the translational side, would be to leverage local strengths to make sure area institutions were fully capitalizing. And the third would be to increase access to capital.