SSTI Digest

For many university tech transfer operations, the need to generate revenues to support the office and attempt to meet the often pie-in-the-sky expectations of school administrators can force licensing efforts toward only the biggest deals. Thanks to a large donation to serve as an endowment, the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering will be able to count on $1 million in interest income to support its technology transfer activities.

Dr. John Reed, president and CEO of The Burnham Institute, was appointed to the Independent Citizen's Oversight Committee that will govern the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine created last month.

Just as SSTI and other post-election analysts predicted, California’s recent passage of a $3 billion commitment to stem cell research is triggering responses from across the country. Wisconsin is the first to outline a specific, strategic reaction to the California referendum in an effort to retain or regain momentum in the race to encourage bio-based economic growth.

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle announced last week his plans to invest nearly $750 million in state funds to support biotechnology, health sciences and stem cell research. According to Gov. Doyle, the two states are not in competition; rather, he suspects there will be a synergy between them.

"Wisconsin can’t match California dollar for dollar, but California can’t match what Wisconsin already has - including the best scientists in the world and first class research institutions," Gov. Doyle said.

Using data from its 2004 Best Performing Cities Index, Milken has generated a comprehensive table ranking cities by one- and five-year measurements of job growth, wages and salaries, and relative high tech gross domestic product (GDP) growth, and other measurements.

SSTI would like to draw readers' attention to one of those other measurements, Milken's high-tech GDP location quotient (LQ), which may be of some value to the tech-based economic development community. LQ is defined as a measure of high-tech concentration, with the U.S. given a value of 1.0. For the Milken study, metro areas having an LQ higher than 1.0 are said to be more concentrated in high tech sectors than the U.S.

What policies, investments and programs would be most effective for communities trying to attract, retain or build a local pharmaceutical industry? Research parks? Tax incentives? Biotech seed capital funds?

The answers one gets will vary, but using historical data on patent activity and observing the location of the largest pharmaceutical companies, a group of researchers suggests investments in academic R&D that lead to publications is not a bad place to start.

Duane Roth is the new executive director of UCSD CONNECT. Roth was CEO of Alliance Pharmaceuticals in San Diego.

While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have voiced caution and funded efforts to understand the potential societal and environmental implications of nanotechnology deployment, both agencies announced much larger funding commitments - totaling $213 million - to expedite commercial applications for the explosive field.

Nanotech Solutions for Cancer

Carrying a federal five-year price tag of $144.3 million, the NIH's National Cancer Institute (NCI) is forming the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, a comprehensive, integrated initiative encompassing researchers, clinicians, and public and private organizations that have joined forces to develop and translate cancer-related nanotechnology research into clinical practice.

More than half since recession "officially" ended

There is little comforting news in a new statistical report for workers in the U.S. information and communication technologies (ICT) sector. Researchers from the University of Illinois-Chicago found the sector lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001 and April 2004.

A staggering 200,000 of the high-wage jobs were lost since the recession was officially declared over in November 2001, making the notion of a jobless recovery a significant understatement for the sector.

The resilience of the regional ICT sectors and the overall economies of the seven profiled metropolitan areas are being tested with the incredible losses suffered since the bubble burst in March 2001. The following list presents the percentage change in total ICT employment between March 2001 and April 2004 for the seven primary metropolitan statistical areas (PMSA):

As part of a new initiative to address pressing ethical, legal and social questions raised by recent advances in genetic and genomic research, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has awarded approximately $20 million in grants to fund interdisciplinary centers within universities around the country over the next five years. NHGRI is one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

According to NIH, each of the centers will assemble a team of experts in several disciplines such as bioethics, law, behavioral and social sciences, clinical research, theology, public policy and genetic and genomic research to develop innovative research approaches focused on specific sets of issues related to genomic research. The centers’ output, according to NIH, will be critical in formulating and implementing effective and equitable health and social polices related to genomic research.

New York City Launches Second Biotech Incubator Companies wanting to commercialize new technologies can now bring their companies to Brooklyn, with the June opening of a new technology incubator located near Downstate University's biochemistry department. The Advanced Biotechnology Incubator will eventually house up to 30 companies, according to Eva Brown Cramer, vice president for biotechnology and scientific affairs at Downstate. The $12 million incubator, funded by both government and private sources, is a first for Brooklyn and second to be opened in New York City. The first was opened in 1995 at Columbia University, according to the Daily News.



Colorado Incubator Merges With Venture Company, Becomes CTEK