“My mandate is to educate, train and develop scientists for the NBAF,” said Steve Higgs, research director of the Biosecurity Research Institute at Kansas State. NBAF, the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, is the planned research facility that will replace the 1950s-era Plum Island facility in New York. The 520,000-square-foot facility is scheduled to become fully operational by 2020 and employ up to 300 people. K-State has fought very hard to secure it and get it funded. Success, said Higgs, will require collaboration between federal labs, like NBAF, and biotech facilities and industries here in the region.
Peter Dorhout, the dean of arts and sciences at K-State, argued that one of the critical missions for everyone around the table would be educating the work force for biotechnology’s future. “One of my goals as dean of arts and sciences,” said Dorhout, “is to really engage graduate students and undergraduate students in the whole inquisitive process of learning about science.”
Bi-State Collaborations
From the windows of Polsinelli Shughart, one can see the state of Kansas less than a mile away. As Kevin Sweeney pointed out, the uniquely bifurcated nature of the region makes competition between the states inevitable, and collaboration difficult. He wondered how institutions dealt with that reality.
“It is not just cross-border collaboration that has to be cultivated here,” said KU’s Joe Heppert. “It is collaboration between institutions that are in the same state.” One challenge for him is to create stronger collaborations between KU and KU Medical Center, which is part of the same system. One area in which KU is looking to foster collaboration, both with K-State and the University of Missouri, is bioinformatics.
“Cancer doesn’t recognize the state line,” said Jeff Reene. He cited the momentum generated by Roy Jensen’s return to the Kansas City area in 2004 to help University of Kansas Cancer Center obtain National Cancer Institute designation.
“It was very apparent that we needed to rise above the traditional challenges there,” said Reene. In creating the Midwest Cancer Alliance, a collaboration of 15 institutions on both sides of the state line, the goal was “to rally together and leverage our collective capabilities in terms of this pursuit of NCI (National Cancer Institute) designation.”
Reene cited two other examples of successful bi-state collaboration, one being the clinical and translational science award that involved seven or eight institutions. “That’s a huge feather in our cap as a region,” said Reene. A third example is the IAMI, the Institute for Advancing Medical Innovation at KU Med Center funded by a Kauffman Foundation grant. “We’ve had some phenomenal early results there in terms of collaborations with Children’s Mercy,” said Reene. “We intentionally set aside the state line. We’re not big enough to figure this out alone. We’ve got to figure out how to collaborate.”
As Dan Getman observed, there is an intense competition for funding at the national level, and most of the grants now require cross-institutional collaborations. In the region, he noted, each of the different institutions has unique strengths. “Rather than trying to elevate every area at each institution,” he recommended that area institutions “build on our strengths.” That is already occurring. “If we don’t do that,” he added, “we won’t be able to compete nationally.”
According to Robert Casillas, MRIGlobal has succeeded with partnerships not just across state lines but within the larger region. “It is a business model for MRIGlobal to partner,” said Casillas. The federal funding environment all but demands “pre-partnering.”
