“I feel in terms of what I am worried about day by day,” said Jake Halliday, president and CEO of the Missouri Innovation Center, “is trying to make sure that entrepreneurs are limited only by their imagination and not by infrastructure.”
Keith Gary, the director of program development at KCALSI, works on any number of critical issues with his constituents—workforce development, advocacy, scientific collaboration. What challenges him most is “reining in the herd and keeping them headed in the same direction.”
“More than anything else,” affirmed Kelly Gillespie, “the challenges that we face have to do with uniting a life sciences community to make sure that the public is putting forth science-friendly and business-friendly approaches to the life sciences.”
Sitting in for MRI CEO Jim Spigarelli, called away for an urgent DC meeting, was Linda Cook, MRI’s director of communications. As Cook explained, the 1800-employee Institute has experienced considerable growth in the last several years. “Our big priority is how to maintain that momentum and how to keep it going,” she noted. MRI has a particular eye on Defense funding.
“I see one of the major problems as senior, knowledgeable leadership in government, the people who are making the decisions,” said David Franz, who works with both MRI and Kansas State University. He also saw the need for finding and developing young people to do the work when contracts come in.
Sandra Willsie is executive vice president for academic affairs at Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences (KCUMB), the largest medical school in Missouri. “Our daily challenge,” she commented, “is recruiting, retaining and continually having funding for highly talented, devoted researchers and keeping them from straying away from the pack.”
Jeff Southard, co-founder and vice president of clinical development for VasoGenix Pharmaceuticals, noted that his company was successful as a start-up in getting all the seed funding that was available at the time. “Where we really struggled,” he added, “was in getting the followup on funding to get to the next level.” Part of the problem, he added, “is getting recognition on the East and West coasts.”
Lesa Mitchell affirmed Southard’s point, stressing that the recognition problem was not limited to Kansas, but encompassed the greater Midwest. So, too, did Scott Weir, a research administrator with the University of Kansas. One of the challenges KU faces, especially the cancer center, is the ability to advance promising compounds coming out of drug discovery within the university. “In order to be able to do that we need to raise funds,” said Weir.
Mike Chippendale had served as interim director of the Bond Life Sciences Center at the University of Missouri before leaving to start a consulting company dealing with life sciences facilities. His immediate need is to find a niche and establish a clientele, but the larger issue, as he sees it, is how we should be designing lab facilities to incorporate 21st century realities.
Jim Guillory, associate dean of research at KCUMB, cited “conflicting priorities within the institution” as a pressing concern. For more than 100 years, the institution has been educating physicians. Now the challenge is to educate scientists, biochemists, laboratory people. “It’s a culture change that we are going through,” said Guillory.
“I will be echoing what Jim has said,” commented Beth Montelone, associate dean for research at the College of Arts and Sciences at Kansas State University. As a public research university, Kansas State University is charged with both educating the youth of the state of Kansas and with finding opportunities for its high quality researchers.
“One of the things I care deeply about is that integration between the public and the private sector,” said Jim Guikema, associate vice provost for research at K-State. His goal is to leverage the region’s collective resources in ways that wouldn’t be possible unless everyone worked together. “In plant science and animal science and human health,” said Guikema, “we want to make some partnerships work.”
Joan Hunt, the multi-tasking research administrator from the University of Kansas Medical Center, reinforced Guikema’s point. She sees the need “to change the culture” so that researchers in academic institutions gain interest in developing partnerships with industry. “We have a long way to go,” she noted, “but we have efforts underway.”
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