U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt

He carried a to-do list with him that he plans to take to Congress and the Obama Administration.

Changing the way the Food and Drug Administration regulates the development of new medicines,  making the research and development tax credit for companies permanent and establishing a federal office to spearhead public-private partnerships between universities, the National Institutes of Health and R&D companies were among the suggestions on the list.

“It needs to be the new space program in my view,” Gephardt told about 100 people at the packed Capital City Club in Raleigh. 

Gov. Beverly Perdue, mayors and economic development officials from across the state attended the event, which was meant as a first step to build grassroots support for Gephardt’s to-do list.

At stake is the global leadership position the U.S. built in the past 30 years in discovering new medical treatments, improving quality of life and advancing health care, according to a report the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice released June 10. The Council for American Medical Innovation, or CAMI, an advocacy group Gephardt chairs, commissioned the report.

Experts, investors and bright minds from industry, universities and foundations whose brains the Battelle researchers picked, pinpointed several risk factors that the U.S. is in danger of losing its medical innovation edge.

Among those factors is the declining number of novel medicines that have come to market in the past decade. Between 2005 and 2008, the FDA approved on average 19 per year compared to an average 31 per year during the 1990s. A nearly 29 percent decline in venture capital that set emerging biomedical companies back during the recession was also troublesome. So were the science scores among 12th graders, which declined almost 3 percent from 1996 to 2005.

Health care and research to find new treatments have long been among Gephardt’s interests. What caught his attention was a novel triple cancer therapy that saved his son’s life nearly 40 years ago, he said. Gephardt supported a form of universal health care and helped double the NIH’s budget to support basic research to about $30 billion in 2003.

The unprecedented increase in NIH funding several years ago and a $10 billion boost the NIH received in stimulus funds last year benefited research institutions across the Triangle, including Duke University, RTI International and the University of North Carolina.

But Gephardt’s agenda to spur medical innovation and create more R&D jobs in the U.S. will face a Congress and a White House trying to gain control over a ballooning federal deficit. Gephardt didn’t think the NIH’s budget will be cut, but he acknowledged the belt-tightening mood in Washington by saying that his to-do list isn’t a “big ticket item. Yes,” he added, “this costs money, but the payoff is enormous.”

Dr. Laura Jackson of the EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL), a unit of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development that is housed in Research Triangle Park.

Dr. Jackson and her colleagues in this RTP lab—more than 100 scientists—conduct research on ecosystem services, those benefits provided by the environment over and above the psychological benefits of being out in nature. These services can have tangible and measurable economic value.

For instance, in a normally functioning ecosystem, vegetation would take up nitrogen and phosphorus from animal waste and keep those nutrients from overburdening groundwater and streams. In last week’s example, when hogs were added to an ecosystem, they knocked it out of balance by depositing more nutrients than the vegetation could handle and by removing plants that could take up the nutrients and provide erosion control. The researchers at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems were developing countermeasures to keep the water clean near hog farming operations and restore ecosystem function.

In addition to cleaning water, vegetation can also scrub pollutants from the air, and the EPA’s Dr. Jackson and her colleagues are looking into the capacity of plantings near roads to filter pollutants from vehicles. Given the connection between tailpipe emissions and respiratory illnesses, this promises to be a fruitful area of research: imagine the cost savings on medication and lost work time if nature can help prevent illness.

Another example of an ecosystem service, Dr. Jackson said, is the ability of urban vegetation to mitigate the “heat-island” effect, reducing the risk of heat stress in vulnerable populations. (Think green roofs.) In this example, nature would not only alleviate illness but eliminate some of the need to burn fossil fuels for air conditioning.

It’s already obvious that ecosystem services can be an important public health tool, and we haven’t even gotten to the topic I called Dr. Jackson to discuss: Lyme disease.

Lyme is of growing concern in the Research Triangle region; more on that in a moment. It is also of particular interest to me, because I am a renegade Durhamite living in New York’s Hudson Valley. My new home is not only the hotbed of Lyme disease but one of the hotbeds of Lyme disease research. It’s almost child’s play to get Lyme disease here, and nearly any symptom that brings you to the doctor will result in blood tests for Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses. They are that common.

At the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, where I am loosely affiliated as a science writer, Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld is leading a team studying the impact of biodiversity on Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses. Long-term research conducted by Ostfeld’s lab reveals that more people get Lyme disease when natural landscapes are fragmented by development and other human activities. Large carnivores who need lots of space are driven away, and white-footed mice, which carry the bacteria that causes Lyme, thrive in the absence of these predators.

Given my newfound geographical interest in Lyme, I was incredibly interested to hear that someone in the Triangle—my beat for this blog—is working on this same topic. Dr. Jackson talked to me about her research findings and about how the EPA is using research like hers to affect decision making.

Dr. Jackson initiated the Lyme research as part of her Ph.D. program in Ecology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her primary research tool: satellite imagery upon which she plotted records of Lyme disease cases gleaned from existing state health department records. Using an off-the-shelf statistical program, she was able to identify the types of landscapes most associated with high rates of Lyme disease: places where the edges of forests intermixed with herbaceous cover such as lawn or pasture.

And these are the kinds of places where new neighborhoods are being developed, says Jackson. “It’s popular to build out towards ‘green fields’ or undeveloped land,” she says. “People want to be near forests.” On these edges, where deer, ticks, white-footed mice, and people all exist, it’s what she calls “a perfect environment” for the transmission of Lyme disease.

Figure from Hilborn E, Jackson L, Orme-Zavaleta J. 2010. Environment and Lyme Disease Risk. Pages 399-414 In: Holmgren, A. and G. Borg (eds.), Handbook of Disease Outbreaks: Prevention, Detection and Control. Nova Science Publishers: New York.

There is no vaccine against Lyme disease in humans; it can be treated with antibiotics, but people can get it many times if infected ticks bite them. Individuals can avoid the disease by dressing appropriately, using bug spray, and checking their skin for ticks. Education in these individual measures is one public health approach to disease prevention.

But to Dr. Jackson, a broader approach to risk is called for. One landowner on a forest edge can clear shrubs to discourage deer, or lay down a strip of wood chips as a buffer between forest and lawn, but unless all of the property owners along an edge do this, she says, the risk factors will remain for the entire nearby population. She believes that whole neighborhoods have to work in concert to reduce risk.

In addition, one goal is to “design out the risk” for Lyme and related diseases by making decisions about land use based on research findings. To that end, she and her EPA colleagues are partnering with Michigan State University’s Digital Watershed to create an online tool that will predict whether developing a particular landscape in a particular way will create a high or low risk for Lyme disease. It will become part of EPA’s online Environmental Decision Toolkit in the future. Using tools like this, it is possible that without spending an extra cent in development costs or public health money, neighborhoods could be designed that work with nature to reduce the risk of Lyme. That is the concept of ecosystem services at work.

Although Dr. Jackson’s original research focused on Maryland, it has implications for the Research Triangle area, where she grew up. “The tick is here,” she says, referring to the black-legged tick that carries the bacterium that causes Lyme. “And the disease is here.” As wildlife habitats are being converted for development, she says, we don’t have the expansive natural habitats that we used to have. Given the style of development happening in the Triangle, she says, “it’s not surprising that Lyme is here.”

I first saw Phaedra Boinodiris speak as the opening speaker at TEDxRTP (my review) back in March, but this was a different kind of talk, geared more towards scientists and science communicators.

I remember playing Pong when it first came out. I remember spending many hours back in 1980 or so playing The Hobbit on Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And I played many games at arcades (still not knowing which games started out as arcade games adapted to computers and which the other way round). Then I quit playing games for a couple of decades until my kids were ready for them. I loved Zoombinis – an amazing game of logic and a brilliant preparation for taking IQ tests! I loved Richard Scarry’s Busytown – the one and only game I know about infrastructure, where players build stuff and deliver it to others for the good of the town – from baking bread to paving roads – learning along the way how those things are done.

And sure, Phaedra Boinodiris started with a slide depicting Pong (to the chuckle of the audience) but soon got into the real stuff – the serious gaming and the story of how she got involved in developing such games, as well as about studies of gaming and how different kinds of games help develop different real-work skills, from eye-hand coordination to leadership to cooperation. Her first game – INNOV8 – was developed as a prototype, a proof of concept, in only three months and instantly became a huge hit. It is used by businesses and business schools around the world to teach Business Process Management. It is essentially a first person shooter game (without guns) in which the player is brought as an outside consultant into a company where s/he has to figure out the flow, the bottlenecks, etc. (including by interviewing employees, as well as data-sheets) and experiment in making it more efficient. The 2.0 version came soon after, adding such problems as traffic, customer service and supply chains.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The next game, recently announced and coming out in October 2010, will be a Sim-City-like serious game CityOne, designed to help city planners, town councils, citizens, and engineers plan better, more efficient infrastructure for their cities. Put in your city’s specs and start building new infrastructure, see how much it will cost, see what problems will arise, see what solutions are available – probably something you could not have thought of yourself and may be surprised.

As I am currently reading ‘On The Grid’ it occured to me that the developers of CityOne should read that book, and that Scott Huler should be given a test-run of the game, perhaps for him to review for Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News&Observer and the local NPR station. And for Science In The Triangle, of course.

Monday, May 17

BizMix: A Professional Approach to After-hours Business Connections

5:00 – 7:00pm

The Matthew House, 317 West Chatham Street, Cary, NC 27511

Looking for a business after-hours that’s worth your time? Benefit from a structured setting, connect with leaders and meet our reporting staff.

$15 Triangle Business Journal subscribers; $25 others. Read more here.

Tuesday, May 18

Widening the Pipeline: Excellence in STEM Education (Luncheon)

12:00 – 1:30pm

CED’s Entrepreneurship Center, 100 Capitola Drive, Durham, 27713

How Do We Build the Pipeline of Next Generation STEM Employees? Join the Contemporary Science Center for lunch as we explore and discuss with award-winning Science, Technology, Engineering & Math educators from Charlotte and Raleigh.

Registration $20. Register here.

TARDC May Lunceon

12:00 – 1:15 pm

RTP Headquarters, 12 Davis Drive

Speaker: Dr. Maria Escolar, Director of the Program for the Study of Neurodevelopmental Function in Rare Disorders at UNC Chapel Hill. Lunch will be provided.

Free for TARDC members; $35 others; $25 CED members. RSVP to rousseau@rtp.org

Wednesday, May 19

President’s National Export Initiative Luncheon

11:30am – 1:00pm

Hotel Indigo, 151 Tatum Drive, Durham, NC 27703

TOPIC: President’s National Export Initiative; Speaker: Ro Khanna , Deputy Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration, Office of Domestic Operations.

Free. More info here.

CED’s BioTech Forum

5:30 – 8:00 pm

North Carolina Biotechnology Center, RTP, NC

During this presentation and interactive panel discussion we will answer several key questions to provide insight into what will likely drive the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries’ partnering efforts moving forward.

Find out more here.

Speed Networking in the Triangle

5:45 – 8:45pm

Wyndham at RTP, 4620 South Miami Boulevard, Durham, NC

Based on the format of speed dating, attendees will have five minutes to network with each new person you meet. Once the five minutes is up, you will move to the next person and continue networking.

Only 50 attendees allowed! Purchase a ticket here.

Thursday, May 20

If It Isn’t Broke, It Will Be! Reinvent your Business Model

11:30 – 1pm

CED Headquarters, 100 Capitola Drive suite 106 Durham , NC 27713

Participants will focus on evaluating, creating and re-inventing current business models.  This seminar teaches state-of-the art methods that produce transformative ideas and solutions.

$20, including lunch. Sign up here.

Quality In BioPharma Conference (through Fri, May 21)

8:00am (5/20) – 5:00pm (5/21)

NC State University, Centennial Campus, 2410 Campus Shore Drive #218, Raleigh, NC 27695

The focus of the two-day event will be Environmental Monitoring in Biomanufacturing, and will have noteworthy talks, discussions, and networking events for professionals involved in the Quality, Manufacturing, Environmental Microbiology, and Process Engineering areas of the industry.

Register here.

Friday, May 21

BTWW: Cyclists’ Breakfast at RTP HQ

7:00am – 9:00am

Cyclists can mingle and enjoy free breakfast
courtesy of the Research Triangle Foundation.

Saturday, May 22

ProductCamp RTP: Share In The Innovation!

8:00am – 6:00pm

Cambria Suites @RDU Airport, 300 Airgate Drive, Morrisville, NC‎

In the spirit of BarCamp, ProductCamp is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Management and Marketing.

Register online here.

Ongoing (All Week)**

Bike to Work Week

All around the Triangle!

Sponsored by GoTriangle.

Find out more here.

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To view a complete calendar of RTP community events, please visit the Science in the Triangle calendar.

Monday, May 3

Why Scientists are Rhetoricians, Too: They don’t have any choice

11:00 AM – 12:45 PM

Thomas Hall, Room 3503 (Stevens Room) NCSU

Lecture by Dr. Carolyn Miller, SAS Institute and distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication at North Carolina State University

Free

Global Health Lecture “Risk and Cost Analysis in Pest Management: Application to Genetically Modified Mosquitoes”

4:00 – 5:00 PM

LSRC A109 (Nicholas School of the Environment) Duke University

Speaker: John Mumford Professor John Mumford of Imperial College London, and the director of the Centre for Environmental Policy

Free. More information.

Tuesday, May 4

Meet the New Media: Celebration of Women Event

10:00 — 11:30 AM

The Pavillions at the Angus Barn, Raleigh

Wanted: Women in the News Meet national journalists who cover business and women’s issues.  Space is limited – Register today!

UNC/NCSU Research and Design Symposium

3:00-8:00 PM

NC Biotechnology Center, RTP

The UNC/NCSU Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering Research and Design Symposium is the annual showcase event for senior design and graduate students. The event attracts an industrial and academic audience and features oral and poster presentations and a networking social.

More information and registration.

Wednesday, May 5

JobNob Raleigh Happy Hour

4:30-7:30 PM

Solas Raleigh, 419 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh

Come “Jobnob” with cool new start ups and talented job seekers at this informal networking happy hour where you can find startup jobs.

Free but registration required.

Thursday, May 6

Mike Duke Seminar: Species Delimitation in Spiders

2:00 – 3:30 PM

Clark Labs, NCSU

Lecture by: Dr. Jason Bond, East Carolina University

More information.

Friday, May 7

40 Under 40 Leadership Awards

11:30 AM – 2:00 PM

North Ridge Country Club, Raleigh

More information.

To view a complete calendar of RTP community events, please visit the Science in the Triangle calendar.

“Salamanders can regenerate. Why can’t we?,” Atala asked during a TEDMed talk last fall.

Dr. Anthony Atala

Actually, we can and we do, he responded Tuesday during a presentation at Research Triangle Park headquarters, where he had traveled from Winston-Salem to talk at the TARDC luncheon. “It’s real,” he said.

The human body replaces bones every 10 years, skin every two weeks and intestinal tissue every six days. Regenerative medicine taps into the body’s ability to regrow tissue, expands on it and speeds it up in the laboratory.

The aim is to cure diseases with the help of spare parts the body doesn’t reject.

Researcher are already able to grow most tissues in the lab. Cartilage cells have been used to repair damaged knee ligaments since the mid-1990s. In 1999, Atala was the first to implant a laboratory-grown organ into a patient. The organ was a bladder.

Now researchers are working on skin, blood vessels and entire livers, kidneys and lungs. Within a decade or two, they may be able to make a whole heart, repair a damaged spinal cord or implant insulin-producing beta cells to erase diabetes.

A three-day forum the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine held two weeks ago to bring together researchers, investors and companies developing products explored some of the promises and challenges in the field.

The promise of regenerative medicine is in the wealth of products moving through the regulatory pipeline. More than 50 research and development programs are under way to come up with products, Atala said at the forum. About 10 clinical trials testing products in patients have either started or are about to start and another 50 trials are scheduled over the next four years.

Challenges include making the products and convincing the health care system to pay for them.

At the TARDC luncheon Atala brought up one example to outline costs and benefits of regenerative medicine: About 90 percent of the patients on transplant lists are waiting for kidneys. While they’re on dialysis, they cost the U.S. health care system about $250,000 per year each. Kidneys grown in the lab would not only shorten the wait for a transplant but also lower costs for dialysis and for drugs that prevent rejection of tansplants.

How much is a lab-grown kidney worth, Atala asked. “$50,000? $100,000? $200,000?”

While regenerative medicine companies are giving this question a lot of thought, researchers in the labs are addressing challenges of making the products, such as growing enough tissue from a cell sample half the size of a postage stamp to cover an area the size of a football field in about 60 days.

The Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine uses five different approaches in the lab, Atala said. “We’re trying to see which strategy gets us there first.”

• In experiments to make whole livers, researchers have washed discarded organs with mild detergents to extract the liver cells. What remains is a collagen scaffold that looks like a liver and contains a vascular tree. Researchers then seed the scaffold with new liver cells or stem cells.
• To build whole hearts, researchers use a three-dimensional printer whose cartridge is filled with gel and cells rather than ink.
• An experiment that involved steers and cows used stacks of wavers seeded with kidney cells. Because an organ doesn’t fail until more than 90 percent of its function is gone, the tissue wafers promise to add enough functionality to a badly damaged kidney to keep a patient off dialysis.
• Researchers inject stem cells or the patient’s cells to regenerate tissue.
• In cases where tissue is needed that doesn’t grow in the lab, researchers use stem cells harvested from amniotic fluid.

Here’s Dr. Atala’s talk at TEDMed:

Click here to view the embedded video.

While it would be impossible to separate the global from the state-level issues discussed at the forum, some of the local business people offered examples for specific challenges to innovation that they faced.

Alexander Macris is the president of Themis Group which is based in Durham, N.C. and is a strong example of the power of a science park like RTP to attract additional tech-based businesses to the region. Macris said that the Triangle region is one of the largest concentrations of gaming companies in the U.S. Most of the innovation potential in gaming is at the gaming engine and software level, he said, and the average median income of someone in the gaming industry is about $75,000. He expects to see about 300 to 400 new gaming-related jobs in the area over the next three to five years, he said, because the industry is growing in the double digits. But at the same time, the cost of game development is going up – whereas a decade ago it may have cost $1 million to develop a game, it costs $20 to $30 million to do so today, Macris said. Foreign countries give more tax credits to their gaming companies, he said, which makes them more competitive in the global field and is hurting U.S.-based gaming companies. “Targeted tax credits are a huge attractant to small and start-up businesses in the gaming industry,” Macris said. “And cool downtowns, the creative class really likes a vibrant downtown too.”

While deeper tax credits may help some start-ups get a toe-hold in emerging markets, retaining the best talent is necessary to sustain them over time. And while uber cool downtowns like the American Tobacco District in Durham are one component of enticements to retain the best brains, it’s a smaller part of the issue. Jennie Hunter-Cevera of RTI said that 50 percent of foreign students who earn a doctorate in the U.S. end up exporting their knowledge by returning to their home countries. “We have a brain drain going on, and we need to make it easier and more attractive for the brightest to stay,” she said. (What do you think will help retain top-graduating foreign students in the U.S.? Leave a comment.)

Tim Toben, who chairs the NC Energy Policy Council, said that certain existing state policies were attempting to tap emerging markets by requiring utility companies to use renewable energy for 12.5 percent of their energy mix by 2021. While critics say the target is too low, Toben said that N.C. has a record of being one of the most progressive southeastern states when it comes to energy and the environment. “The utilities know we are moving into a carbon-constrained future,” Toben said, citing a Duke Energy plan to drop their reliance on coal from 42 percent today t 32 percent in 2030, or even as low as 17 percent. “For entrepreneurs, what resources will replace this ? Wind? Nuclear? Biomass? There’s a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs in a carbon-limited future and we want N.C. to be the leader in the Southeast in the new green economy.” (Which begs the question: What specifically is the state energy office doing to help start-ups like MegaWatt Solar or BioRxn?  I have not looked into this at all, so if you have any insight then please leave a comment down below.)

But even if the policies, foreign visas and the vision of local leaders and educators all align into the perfect climate for innovative business, what sort of characteristics do innovative businesses and visionary business leaders typically have? Clay Thorpe, a partner of Hatteras Venture Partners, shared a list of just such traits he amassed from talking to high-level personnel in Genentech. “I’ve been asked why N.C. has not had a homegrown success, a globally-innovative business develop here,” Thorp said. “And I’ve thought about this a lot. We’re the number three biotech hub in the country, and we’re good at attracting existing businesses to the area.” Thorp said he had an opportunity to meet with leaders from Genentech, widely considered one of the main founding companies of the biotech industry, and he asked them what they thought contributed to their success.

“You have to have a driver, like Bob Swanson at Genentech, who set the cultural tone.” Thorp said. “I hesitate to say it, but it’s almost 5 to 10 percent the quality of the technology and 90 to 95 percent the driver.” In addition to having a visionary and energizing leader, Genentech spent an inordinate amount of time hiring good people, he said. They would court people they wanted to attract, sometimes for years, and chose very carefully. The leaders also fostered an ethic of loyalty and hardwork, which resulted in dedicated employees “going the extra mile” when it was needed. The company was also built upon a foundation of “patient, long-standing capital,” Thorp said, which gave them the stability and time to do proper research. In addition, Genentech required its scientists to publish scientific papers on their research and they held them to such high academic standards that often Genentech papers were cited over papers by ivey-league academic researchers.

While there were no clear answers presented at the Global Innovation Forum on Friday, a lot of conservation was generated. We want to hear from you — what are your thoughts on state or federal policies, or cultural shifts, that will help carve a climate favorable to business innovation with global trade potential? Let us know in the comments section below.

“We’re here today to learn from you so that we can go back to Washington and do what we do,” said NFTC president Bill Reinsch in his opening remarks. “We want to build relationships with companies and open a conversation with them to develop stronger links.” Reinsch said that his group was traveling to technology-innovation clusters like RTP and Silicon Valley to find out first-hand from companies what sort of policies were encumbering them from doing business globally, which were helping, and what sort of ideas they had for the future.

How to create and sustain jobs and businesses is a question that both federal and local governments have wrestled with sharply and frequently since the economic downturn. Research Triangle Park, NC has long been a technology-hub and economic engine for the state, noted RTP CEO Rick Weddle, and the area has excelled in life sciences, information technology, and biotech markets, but capturing emerging markets like gaming and clean energy technologies will be vital to RTP maintaining its vitality in the future. But how can science parks like RTP, and the states they’re rooted in, cultivate homegrown small businesses (and they jobs and economic resilience they generate) in emerging and established markets, especially when the banks are slow to lend — if they lend at all — and cash is plain hard to come by?

NC State Treasurer Janet Cowell presented one state-level contribution to the problem: a still-forming program called the Innovation Fund that will invest $230 million in N.C. businesses over the next three to five years from the state’s $67 billion pension fund. “Our pension fund is bigger than General Motors,” Cowell said. “Other states have used this approach for distressed parts of their states, but we’re applying this method with a market-based approach which makes me confident we can expect a return on our investment.” In other words, the state may be coughing up cash from the pension fund in the short-term, but they expect the money to generate more cash over time. The state plans to allocate about 10 to 25 percent of the $230 million as venture capital, 5 to 15 percent will be growth equity, 40 to 60 percent will be used for buyouts, and 5 to 35 percent for special situations. They will sprinkle their investments across established and emerging market sectors including: agriculture, life sciences, clean technology, green technology and renewable energy. The Innovation Fund is managed by Credit Suisse which has 1,050 employees in N.C. out of 47,000 global employees, and Cowell said the state chose them because of their performance record managing similar funds. (For more information, visit www.ncinnovationfund.com.)

But cash is only one prong of the multi-pronged solution to stimulating local scientific and business innovations with global potential. Access to a well-educated and prepared talent pool is a second prong; policies inducive to global trade are a third. These aspects were hashed out at length by two panels focused on the role of state and federal policies.

Sandy Merber, a specialist in international trade regulation and sourcing for General Electric, cited a study that found 84 percent of U.S. businesses said they’d lost business opportunities with China in 2008 because of visa problems in getting their Chinese business partners to the U.S. “It took me one day to get an emergency business visa to get into China, while the average is four days,” Merber said. “Guess what the average is for a Chinese businessman to come here? 31 days. That holds up deals, and that’s got to be expedited.”

Jennie Hunter-Cervera, executive vice-president of RTI, shared that a big challenge her company faces is the labyrinthine international laws that businesses must navigate to get business licenses to work in other countries. RTI works in 40 countries and holds 40 different business licenses in these countries, but she said the process of obtaining a license often slows down the companies ability to grow. She also noted that collaboration is difficult in some foreign countries because they don’t honor the same gene patent laws. RTI wants to take its research “from the bench to the bank” she said, meaning that the group seeks a return on dollars sunk into basic research and development. But it’s far easier to get government-funded grants for basic research than for research demonstrating proof of concept – data that may be necessary to convince a bank or venture capital group to invest in translating a project into a marketable product. “Proof of concept grants are not well-represented in the federal grants mix,” she said.

Heather Osborne Clark, director of trade and policy for Merck & Co., said that her company earns 50 percent of its income outside the U.S. in about 140 different emerging markets, and she reiterated that streamlining foreign visa processes would be helpful to Merck’s growth. She also noted that the resources allotted to foreign government agencies tied to trade and commerce are proportionally larger (in comparison to gross domestic product) than what the US allots to our agencies. “We need to better fund our agencies so that we can be more competitive,” she said.

Most of the business people attending seemed to agree that one area they would like to see the federal government help them abroad was in protecting intellectual property rights in foreign countries. While their rights were well-protected in the U.S., they noted serious infringements could occur in other countries with little in the way of laws or hegemony to help them.

… Part II of this post explores NC-centric issues discussed at the Global Innovation Forum, such as green energy markets, gaming, and characteristics of a globally-innovative business.

NIEHS Seminar: Transcription factor-DNA interactions: cis regulatory codes in genomes

2:30 – 3:30 PM

NIEHS, Rail Building, Rodbell AB

Open to the public. Speaker: Martha L. Bulyk, Ph.D. Speaker Professional Title: Associate Professor of Medicine and Pathology. More information.

Tuesday, April 13

NC BioNetwork Course

Tuesday-Wednesday, All Day

BioNetwork Capstone Center, BTEC, 250 B 850 Oval Drive, Centennial Campus, Raleigh

A Hands-on Approach to Cleaning Validation Addresses the elements of cleaning validation from start to finish and includes in-field exercises. Cost: $495. Instructor: A. Ari

Registration For more information regarding registration, please visit the website.

UNC Emerging Company Showcase

6:00 – 7:30 PM

Koury Auditorium, McColl Building, Kenan-Flagler School of Business, UNC Chapel Hill

Together NC BioStart of the NC TraCS Institute, the Office of Technology Development and Kenan-Flagler Business School are pleased to announce UNC-Chapel Hill’s Emerging Company Showcase. This event will highlight early stage companies built around innovative UNC-Chapel Hill technologies, primarily in the life science space. A series of short company presentations will be followed by a networking reception. More information.

TriDug Meetup

6:30 – 8:00 PM

Duke Corporate Education, 310 Blackwell Street, Durham

The April meetup will be an open mic night. Presenters: Greg Monroe has agreed to present on the Web File Management module. Other presentations TBA as folks come forward and volunteer. The meeting is scheduled to start at 6:30 with a half hour for meet and greet. Presentations should start at 7:00PM. More information.

Periodic Tables

7:00 – 9:00 PM

Broad Street Cafe, 1116 Broad St, Durham

More has been discovered about dog intelligence in the last decade than the preceding 100 years. The Duke Canine Cognition Center was founded to continue studying how dogs understand their world, how dogs might have evolved, and how we might help dogs be even more successful at helping people. Dr. Brian Hare will share some of his work comparing dogs to various species like wolves and chimpanzees. He is also interested in hearing your ideas for dogcentric research questions that you wish they had the answer to. Speaker: Dr. Brian Hare, Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University. More information.

Wednesday, April 14

Innovation in RTP Speaker Series

4:00 – 5:00 PM

RTP Headquarters, 12 Davis Drive, RTP

Topic: Russ Gyurek of Cisco Presents: The future of the Internet: challenges and opportunities! Free event. RSVP required.

Thursday, April 12

Triangle Global Health Consortium Job Fair

12:00 – 5:00 PM

NC Biotechnology Center, 15 TW Alexander Drive, RTP

The Triangle Global Health Consortium is sponsoring this Job Fair/Industry Networking event. Individuals and companies are welcome to participate at no cost.  To register please email nicole.fouche@triangleglobalhealth.org.

Friday, April 16

Going Global to Support North Carolina Innovation: The Role of Innovation Policy in Growing Exports, Creating Jobs, and Solving Global Challenges

RTP Headquarters, 12 Davis Drive, RTP

Hosted by the Global Innovation Forum of the National Foreign Trade Council in partnership with: The Research Triangle Foundation, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions of Duke University, CED, North Carolina Biotechnology Center and North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association. More information.

For a detailed listing of RTP and regional events, please visit the Science in the Triangle calendar.

R&D spending as percentage of federal budget, FY 1962-2009

Sure, federal spending on R&D more than tripled in the past 50 years to about $147 billion in fiscal year 2009, as Lane pointed out Saturday in a talk at N.C. State University. But R&D’s share of all federal spending has been shrinking from nearly 12 percent during the height of the Apollo program in the late 1960s to about 5 percent in 2009, according to numbers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lane, a professor at Rice University and a senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, is particularly concerned about federal funding for research in physics, mathematics and engineering, the disciplines that brought forth computers, the Internet and mobile devices such as the cell phone.

AAAS numbers show that much of the increase in federal R&D spending over the past 30 years has gone to biomedical disciplines. Last year, funding for the National Institutes of Health made up about half of all federal spending for basic research and for R&D that was not aimed at defending the U.S.

Neal Lane

“We do have a president who cares about science,” Lane said. He called the scientists whom President Obama appointed as scientific advisors and government administrators a “terrific team.” But considering the rising federal deficit, budget shortfalls and polarized political leadership, Lane added, “I’m worried that federal research spending will get squeezed.”

Lane visited NCSU on invitation of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, or PAMS, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. But his talk had significance beyond PAMS, even beyond NCSU, one of many U.S. universities tasked with educating tomorrow’s scientists, furthering technological development and feeding the U.S. knowledge economy.

Federal R&D spending is the lifeblood of the entire Research Triangle area, a state economic engine and national R&D hot spot that is known around the world.

Research Triangle Park, which has NCSU, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as its corners, reflects the federal R&D funding evolution that began during World War II. Work to establish RTP began in 1957, the same year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite. The science park opened in 1959, just as the space race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. got under way.

In the past 30 years, RTP’s development has mirrored the shift in federal R&D funding priorities from the space age with its focus on national security to the age of medicine and a new focus on health. Today, first signs are emerging that RTP, which employs more than 40,000, is tapping into the next phase in federal R&D funding, a phase that focuses on renewable energy, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and technologies that reduce the U.S. dependence on oil.

This phase rests on climate changes that remain controversial even though scientists have tracked them for years.

“The threat of climate change is out there,”  Lane said. “But it’s less urgent than the economy, jobs and health. The message is muddled. There’s some work for us to do out there.”

About 60 percent of all Americans consider public funding for R&D essential, according to a 2009 survey report from the Pew Research Center. More than 70 percent say that government investments in basic research and engineering and technology pay off in the long run.

Despite the broad support, Lane said, “science has never really emerged to be important at the ballot box.”

Scientists have to do a better job conveying this public support to the politicians, he added. “We have to figure out how to be more helpful, how to interact better with the public.”

Where are the scientists and engineers?

Why? Because it could help the U.S. remain a technology exporter in a world where emerging countries such as China and India are gaining ground.

“China is a rising player,” Lane said, pointing to AAAS numbers that show about one-quarter of the world’s 5.8 million scientists and engineers were in the U.S. in 2006. China had about 21 percent and the number was rising, Lane said.

A similar picture is emerging in R&D spending. The U.S. still spends more on R&D than any other country, but Asian countries are turning up the heat.

To bolster his argument that the U.S. is in danger of falling behind, Lane referred to writings by Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin. In a 2007 essay called “Is America falling off the flat earth?” Augustine quotes UNC President Erskine Bowles:“Think about this: in the past four years, our 15 schools of education at the University of North Carolina turned out a grand total of three physics teachers. Three. And we’re going to compete with those guys in Asia? Come on – not that way.”