Pfizer signed a research collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco. Sanofi-Aventis has done the same with Harvard University, UCSF and Stanford University. GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca called on the British University of Manchester. GSK, which is based in London and has its U.S. headquarters in Research Triangle Park, also struck up a strategic partnership with 16 academic institutions in Toronto.

Tom Denny

In the Research Triangle, Novartis went to Duke University.

“We had the right infrastructure,” said Tom Denny, chief operating officer of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. Duke and Novartis will be working together on pandemic flu vaccines.

Big pharma companies have begun to troll for marketable innovation at universities – places where science and research are a taxpayer- and tuition-funded way of life – after spending increasing amounts of money on their own and other companies’ research and development with meager results.

Consolidation, R&D reorganizations, acquisitions of technologies and whole companies – large drugmakers have tried many strategies in the past decade to rejuvenate aging product lineups and plump up drug development pipelines. But the average number of innovative new medicines that came to market in the U.S. decreased to 22 in the second half of the decade from 28 in the first half, and that despite annually rising R&D expenses.

As blockbuster drugs lose patent protection, remaining sales drop off a cliff.

With R&D productivity stalled and valuable drug patents about to expire, big pharma three years ago began to cut R&D jobs and lay off thousands. The restructuring is still ongoing with a focus on reducing R&D expenses and boosting sales in emerging markets such as Asia and Latin America.

The driver behind the cost cutting is the U.S. “patent cliff.”

By 2015, cheaper generics are projected to replace prescription drugs worth more than $100 billion in U.S. sales. The losses are expected to send sales on a sharp decline that, drawn as a line, looks like a cliff.

After trying everything else with insufficient success, large pharma companies are now betting on universities for inspiration.

Pfizer agreed to pay UCSF $85 million over five years. Under the agreement, researchers from Pfizer and UCSF will work at UCSF labs to turn research into potential biological medicines.

The University of Manchester will receive about $16 million from GSK and AstraZeneca. The investment will establish a translational research center and recruit scientists who will look for novel treatments for inflammatory diseases, such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

The pharma industry has long had relationships with individual university professors. It’s also not uncommon that university medical school faculty work with industry to test new treatments or that an academic research project attracts the interest of pharma companies. What’s new is that big pharma companies are outsourcing R&D to universities.

The seed for the pandemic flu vaccine collaboration grew out of an HIV/AIDS collaboration between Novartis and Duke, Denny said.

The Novartis vaccine manufacturing plant in Holly Springs.

One of the Novartis HIV/AIDS researchers was a Duke alumnus who knew his alma mater was just 30 miles from the state-of-the-art flu vaccine manufacturing plant Novartis opened in 2009 in Holly Springs. (More on the Novartis plant here.)

Flu viruses can change from year to year and vaccines have to be made to match the anticipated changes in the virus. But it’s only safe for researchers to work with highly contagious, maybe even deadly, flu virus strains in a specially equipped biocontainment lab. Duke has such a lab and the ability to test pandemic flu vaccines on animals.The vaccine manufacturing plant, which Novartis build in Holly Springs precisely because of the site’s proximity to RTP and its three anchor universities, has neither.

In case a new flu virus starts spreading around the world and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization call a pandemic emergency, the agreement gains Novartis priority access to the Duke biocontainment lab within 24 hours for a daily fee.

The agreement also allows researchers from Duke and Novartis to collaborate on longer-term projects paid for by grants from the National Institutes of Health. The rights to any technology would be jointly owned by each partner, Denny said.

“This is, what we would hope, a long-term collaboration,” he said.

Ideas pop into our heads every day. Only the good ones linger. They survive challenges and reassessment. That’s also true for business ideas, which hold the promise of starting a company, generating income and creating jobs.

Ron Harman

But it’s hard to test how good a business idea really is, because honest feedback is difficult to get, said Ron Harman, owner of CTO Outsourcing, a Durham company that provides software expertise to startups.

“Getting people to tell you how great you are is easy,” Harman said. But few friends, relatives or paid consultants aren’t usually willing to probe an idea for flaws that could kill it.

“Nobody wants to tell you bad news,” Harman said.

To fill that gap, he and six other entrepreneurs in North Carolina’s Research Triangle eight months ago founded the RTP Idea Lab. So far, they’ve held three idea vetting sessions at RTP headquarters.

The sessions attract crowds of a few dozen and combine idea pitches, question-and-answer follow-up and critiques. It’s a concept that’s also being tried in other areas where lots of people work in research and development, including Boston, Pasadena, Calif., Austin, Texas, and at universities, but the efforts aren’t mirror images of each other.

Pasadena-based Idealab has created and operated pioneering technology companies since 1996. Bostinnovation is a digital community hub for ideas that have matured into startups. The Business Innovation Factory in Austin, Texas, is a nonprofit that was founded in 2004 to help innovators test ideas before they turn them into startups. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has an IDEA Group to develop novel biomedical imaging and analysis tools.

The RTP Idea Lab mainly aims to provide a forum where innovators pitch their business ideas to a group of people who are neither experts nor potential investors. Ideas bandied about have ranged from mining company e-mails to prevent theft of intellectual property to matching up retired executives with startups and nonprofits in need of short-term mentoring.

Jim Ingram

“Getting into a group and talking about ideas was very attractive,” said Jim Ingram, a technical writer and a RTP Idea Lab board member. At the most recent session in May, Ingram pitched his idea to reconfigure the hierarchy with which computers file information.

“An idea without an interaction with others is just a thought,” Ingram said. ” It dies in the brain if it isn’t talked about.”

The founders of the RTP Idea Lab, most of them local technology entrepreneurs, also want to stimulate the birth of new companies and the creation of jobs in the Triangle. The area’s unemployment rate has come down slightly in the past year, but it remains above 7 percent, according to April state unemployment figures. That compares to 9.5 percent unemployment statewide.

With federal and state budget cuts looming, it’s not likely that the government and public universities, important contributors to the Triangle’s economy, will be of much help. But technology startups are on a roll. Another Internet gold rush is on, stocks are up, investors are eager and startups are sprouting from New York to Durham.

Anthony Edwards

The Triangle offers plenty of services to form a startup and find a home for it. What the area lacked was a place where people with ideas could ask other people, “What do you think?,” and get a honest answer. That’s where the RTP Idea Lab fits in, said Anthony Edwards, board chairman of the RTP Idea Lab.

Edwards is an IT consultant and a founder of Morrisville-based Tavve Software. He’s also involved in RedOak Logic, a Chapel Hill startup that targets the drug development industry but has yet to be funded.

Having RTP Idea Lab sessions “is good for the community, for RTP,” he said. “It encourages people to form companies.”

He wants to add to the feedback sessions and form partnerships with serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and angel investors to also provide seed funding.

Cyber-criminals probe databases in ways that can be predicted and detected. That's the basis of newly patented IBM software that monitors access to databases for suspicious activity and then locks down critical data.

Burglars often act in predictable ways: they lurk in overgrown bushes, come to your door pretending to be service people, or check for unlocked doors. If you witness this kind of behavior outside your house, you’re likely to check  your locks  and perhaps arm your security system before calling the police.

Cyber-criminals are the same as physical ones, says IBM’s Dave Kaminsky. They probe databases in ways that can be predicted and detected. That’s the basis of U.S. patent no. 7,827,608: software that monitors access to databases for suspicious activity and then locks down critical data, preventing it from being downloaded. It is intended for use at banks, mortgage companies, and other companies that might keep your social security number or other private information in their databases.

Importantly, the software monitors realtime events, acting only if an intrusion appears to be imminent. As Kaminsky says, it would be counterproductive to forestall legitimate attempts to access information (such as for a credit check), just as you don’t want to overreact when someone comes to your house to clean your gutters.

Kaminsky is IBM’s Chief Patent Innovation Architect. Based at RTP, he is not only a frequently patented inventor, but he helps other inventors in the company navigate the “Alice in Wonderland” world of the patent process and contributes to decision-making about which innovations the company should patent. That last is important, because even though IBM received 5,896 patents in 2010, more than any other company, Kaminksy says just a fraction of the company’s eligible innovations go forward in the patent process.

IBM’s RTP site generated 570 patents, and those, combined with patents from Charlotte, made IBM the leading recipient of patents in the state, ahead of Cree, Red Hat, and the leading universities. Most of the patents from RTP are in software. They include a program that routes phone calls to either internet or traditional phone lines to incur cost savings (patent no. 7,710,946, Jim Silwa) and a GPS add-on that gives drivers of hybrid, electric, or other alt-fuel vehicles routing that will lead them to charging stations, thereby reducing their fossil fuel usage (patent no. 7,860,808, Mark Peters). Then there are hundreds more inventions that may not resonate with consumers, like a new caching algorithm, Kaminsky says, but that make our lives easier nonetheless.

Almost 100 years ago, IBM received its first patent. In 2010, it received 5,896, more than any other company

IBM encourages staff members to generate patentable ideas, Kaminsky says, through a financial incentive program and through career advancement: people who contribute to the intellectual property of the organization are likely to advance.

Contrary to the stereotype of the inventor as a lonely figure, most patents achieved at IBM come from ad hoc groups. Kaminsky led a team of four software engineers on the online security project, which took less than six months to complete but almost four years to patent. Ideas come from clients and from the inventors themselves, sometimes through conversations with collaborators and sometimes through “Aha” moments when people think of ways in which technology could solve a problem.

This was the 18th consecutive year that IBM has led the list of U.S. patents received. According to a company press release, “more than 7,000 IBM inventors residing in 46 different U.S. states and 29 countries generated the company’s record-breaking 2010 patent tally.”

“Best thing about #scio11 is that people will pull out an iPhone or iPad in the middle of a convo and they’re not rude; they’re live-blogging.”

If these two tweets give the impression that ScienceOnline 2011 (or #scio11 in the Twitterverse) was a brave new world populated by geeky early adopters who have foresaken pens, paper, and print in favor of devices and Web 2.0, well, that’s partly true.

After all, it was a conference where it was normal to see panelists consulting notes on their iPads, where attendees did in fact live-blog and live-tweet, and where many sessions had a panelist devoted to monitoring Twitter for questions and comments from the audience. (One aggrieved camera operator told me that people watching the live webcast were tweeting complaints about camera angles!)

But in fact, the conference welcomed a number of people who are open to the opportunities afforded by new media even if they are not cutting edge practitioners.

I became particularly interested in how nonprofits were faring with social media, given the challenges of budget and staffing. For instance, I chatted with Katie Mosher, communications director for North Carolina Sea Grant. While some journalists flew in from California and even Ireland, Mosher or someone on her staff is able to attend each year because it’s local and the registration fee is relatively modest. Her organization is one of the conference sponsors, because, she told me, their interest in and support of the goals of ScienceOnline are strong, even if their use of new media is not advanced.

For dot-orgs like NC Sea Grant, the challenge of using new media is largely a staffing issue; finding staff time to learn what’s available and finding staff time to implement it. That’s why attending — and sponsoring — ScienceOnline is valuable. Mosher says, “This conference helps us understand the potential of what we can do online.”

NC Sea Grant does have a Facebook page, and Mosher says, “Not surprisingly, it tends to have a younger audience than our paid subscribers to Coastwatch magazine.” A new intern is interested in helping the organization get started on Twitter.

For groups with limited budgets and staff time, the challenge is not just learning how to use tools like Facebook and Twitter, but learning to use them effectively. Rick MacPherson, interim executive director and conservation programs director at the Coral Reef Alliance, says that the group’s experiments with Facebook paved the ways for constituents to “talk back.”

“Normally with conservation organizations and nonprofits, we do most of the talking,” he says. “We haven’t had an opportunity to have true social engagement with our constituents. Facebook is allowing that. With blogs like Deep Sea News and Southern Fried Science, these are fantastic opportunities for readers, constituents, etc., to talk back to us.” [For the downside of that backtalk, see my post "Why scientists (should) blog."]

Mosher says that NC Sea Grant doesn’t see a lot of commenting on its Facebook page, “but we do see the reposting and sharing.”

Blogging platforms offer nonprofit organizations opportunities to spread the word without having a deep technical support staff. Blogging software is user-friendly, allowing staff to focus on the message, not the technology. Mosher says NC Sea Grant’s marine science newsletter, Scotch Bonnet, has been moved online, using a blog template. The “audience of teachers and other educators have the option to read it on-screen, or to print the hard copy in newsletter layout–to take it with them to read offline. So, the news items have not changed much but the delivery method has.”

Although newsletters have their place, online and on paper, where nonprofits are really shining is in the use of blogs to convey information that the public wants to know. Blogs like Deep Sea News, which MacPherson writes for, present scientifically rigorous information to a public thirsty for scientific knowledge. Mariners Menu gives seafood recipes along with servings of useful information on seafood safety and the cultural history of fisheries. If both of those blogs lead their readers across the internet to learn more about nonprofit organizations protecting our oceans, that’s not a bad thing.

But along the way from startup to giant, those companies go through a second stage of growth, during which they add employees and revenue but are still growing fairly quickly. It’s these second-stage companies that are the unsung heroes of North Carolina’s economy, according to Penny Lewandowski of the Edward Lowe Foundation. In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, 9.7 percent of the resident companies in the state were second stage, but they accounted for almost 35 percent of the state’s jobs.

Penny Lewandowski, director of entrepreneurship development, Edward Lowe Foundation.

The same trend is true in other regions of the country, says Lewandowski, where second stage companies account for a disproportionate number of jobs. (Readers interested in researching trends in company size and job creation can consult the web site youreconomy.org, another initiative of the foundation.)

“These companies are carrying the heavy load of job creation,” Lewandowski says.

Lewandowski, the foundation’s director of entrepreneurship development, came to the Triangle a few weeks ago for the North Carolina Companies to Watch (CTW) awards presentation. The CTW program, sponsored by CED in partnership with the Edward Lowe Foundation, honors privately held second stage companies, those with 10-99 employees and between $1 million and $50 million in revenue. The winners demonstrated exceptional revenue and/or job growth, innovation in marketing or use of technology, and community involvement.

In all, 25 firms were named North Carolina Companies to Watch in the first annual competition. (The complete list appears at the end of this article.)

443 new jobs in a down economy

It’s important to recognize second stage companies, Lewandowski says, because local economies grow through expansion of existing companies rather than the relocation of other companies to a region. “Grow your own” seems to work better than recruitment as an economic engine, in her observation.

As Lewandowski pointed out in her remarks at the awards ceremony, in the four years ending in 2009, the winning companies alone have generated $334 million in revenue and added 443 employees. And that’s in a down economy.

Joan Siefert Rose, president of CED.

Joan Siefert Rose, president of CED, which assists entrepreneurs in the Research Triangle and throughout the state, worked with the foundation to bring Companies to Watch to North Carolina. “We thought it was a great fit and an extension of CED’s work,” she says. That’s in part because many of the startups helped by CED have now successfully transitioned to being second stage companies. “They’ve created jobs and value” for the state, she says, echoing Lewandowski’s observation.

Winners a snapshot of N.C.’s “innovation economy”

In addition, the 25 winners “paint the picture of what the state’s entrepreneurial scene looks like,” Rose says. The winning companies are diverse, representing manufacturing, gaming, software as a service, health sciences and online retailers, a mix that accurately profiles what Rose calls the “innovation economy” in North Carolina.

The winners also included a mortgage firm that doubled its revenue and “a staffing firm that changed their business model, leading to more customers in 2009 than the prior three years combined,” according to Lewandowski. Other winning companies broke new ground in water treatment and solar photovoltaics.

Companies to Watch is a recognition program created by the Edward Lowe Foundation, which supports second stage entrepreneurial companies through a variety of programs, mostly aimed at entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) like CED. “Second stage companies have different needs from startups,” Lewandowski says, “and we help ESOs understand how to serve them.”

Winners and their families at the Companies to Watch awards banquet. Left photo: Roland Johnson, CEO of Piedmont Pharmaceuticals, with his wife and mother. Middle photo: Jean Orelian, CEO of SciMetrika, with his wife Valerie and a friend. Right photo: April Mills of Dickson Hughes talks with Isaak Kunkel, vice president of engineering for winner Digitalsmiths. Photos courtesy CED.

Nominations for 190 companies were received for North Carolina’s competition. The winners were:

• 3tailer

• Affinergy Inc.

• BlueStripe Software, Inc.

• Bronto Software

• Clinipace Worldwide

• Consolidated Asset Recovery Systems, Inc.

• DataChambers, LLC

• Digitalsmiths

• Entex Technologies Inc.

• goodmortgage.com

• Inlet Technologies

• Kyma Technologies, Inc.

• Liquidia Technologies, Inc.

• Piedmont Pharmaceuticals, LLC

• PocketGear, Inc.

• SciMetrika, LLC

• Semprius, Inc.

• ShareFile

• ShopBot Tools, Inc.

• The Select Group

• Themis Group, Inc.

• TheraSim, Inc.

• TransEnterix, Inc.

• Tranzyme Pharma

• Yap

Watch CED’s web site for announcements about next year’s competition.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The first is Launch Day, a Durham event designed to match entrepreneurs with mentors and peers who can help your company grow. The second Launch Day (the first was held in May) will take place on October 5 at the American Tobacco Campus.

An entrepreneur presents his business plan at the first Launch Day at the American Tobacco Campus, May 2010.

Entrepreneurs can register for the opportunity to make a six-minute presentation about their company, and members of the public and the business community will vote on the most promising candidate. The winner will receive a package of resources that is still being finalized, says Launch Day organizer Scott Kelly; it could include sales and marketing assistance, a brainstorming lunch with a venture capital firm, legal advice, or hosting solutions.

The companies presenting at Launch Day should already exist and have a product that is launched or close to launching, with revenues of up to $1 million. Technology companies are ideal for this program, says Kelly, because of their scalability—ability to achieve high growth in a way that traditional companies (apparel, food service) cannot. High-growth, early stage companies in fields like gaming, IT, software as a service, and medical technology are good candidates for Launch Day, he says.

The presentations should focus on what the company needs over the next six to twelve months “to achieve hockey stick projections,” Kelly says. “That could be beta testers, a contact at Costco, office space, legal help.” Even those who don’t win the competition may find the help they need from established business people who will attend, listen, vote and network.

One thing the presenters are unlikely to get is funding. Even though KeySource Bank (where Kelly works) and 8 Rivers Capital are sponsors of Launch Day, it is not intended to match entrepreneurs with venture capital. “This is more of a bootstrap event,” says Kelly. “A pitch for community help.”

What many entrepreneurs need more than capital, Kelly says, is sales assistance, which he hopes to make part of the prize package. “The problem with startups is they fail because they don’t sell enough,” he says. “It’s a difficult transition from being a product company to being a sales engine. The person who started the company is not necessarily a sales person.”

Six minutes may not seem like very much time for a presentation, but it’s expansive compared to the Start Something Twitter pitch contest sponsored by CED. This contest is ongoing and closes on September 30. Using either Twitter or the comments section of CED’s blog, new or established entrepreneurs can make a pitch of no more than 140 characters. A judge’s panel will select five finalists, and the winner will be announced at CED’s housewarming party on October 28. That party also celebrates the organization’s move to American Tobacco Campus in Durham.

Like Launch Day, CED’s Start Something contest rewards its winner with a bundle of prizes including professional consultation and a Lenovo notebook computer.

Is it a coincidence that both of these competitions have an American Tobacco flavor? Within a few weeks, I hope to explore downtown Durham’s growing identity as an incubator for high-tech startups.

Dr. Robert Koger

Dr. Robert Koger is president and executive director of Advanced Energy, a nonprofit organization established by the North Carolina Utilities Commission in 1980 to forestall electrical rate increases by promoting energy conservation and alternative and renewable sources of electricity. Advanced Energy provides services that focus on energy efficiency for commercial and industrial markets, electric motors and drives, plug-in transportation, and applied building science.

Advanced Energy also operates NC GreenPower, a program funded through consumers’ voluntary contributions, designed to increase the amount of renewable energy put on the electric grid in North Carolina and to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

This month, Dr. Koger assumes the chairmanship of Triangle Area Research Directors Council (TARDC), a group of science and technology leaders from local companies, nonprofits, and universities. The group meets over lunch monthly from September to May, to exchange ideas and information and to hear from guest speakers. TARDC’s first meeting under Dr. Koger’s leadership will be September 21, and the guest speaker will be Mr. Joe Freddoso, president and CEO of MCNC/NC STEM. Non-members of TARDC can attend the luncheons.

I recently asked Dr. Koger about the history of Advanced Energy and about his leadership of TARDC.

You were chairing the North Carolina Utilities Commission when it launched Advanced Energy as a nonprofit. What factors went into that decision?

During the 1970s and early 1980s, North Carolina was experiencing phenomenal growth in electric energy demand resulting from both population growth and greater energy use–particularly with homes and businesses installing air conditioning on a very wide-scale basis. Depending on your age, you may remember that very few homes had air conditioning in the 1950s and 1960s. I know my wife and I bought our first house in 1970 and installed air conditioning in it. It had been built in the 1940s.

As a consequence, North Carolina electric utilities (who had not had any rate increase cases for many, many years) started filing yearly large rate increase applications to support the construction of new generating plants and transmission lines needed to serve the growing electrical load (growth in electricity demand was averaging 10 to 12% a year). We would have hundreds and hundreds of people turn out at the public hearings held across the state to oppose the increases.

In the fall of 1979, I was returning from one such hearing in Reidsville that ended at about midnight. Several protestors had suggested placing more emphasis on renewable generation. Also, at that time, little was being done by utilities anywhere to assist their customers with any kind of energy efficiency practices. It occurred to me that we might dampen the need for new generation by looking at ways to conserve energy and also look at alternative ways to generate some of our power requirements. Hence, I thought we might want to propose the establishment of a non-profit corporation that all the state’s utilities (through a tiny surcharge on their customers) could contribute to in order to explore such opportunities. Having one such entity would avoid unnecessary duplication of effort that might result from asking each utility to explore these issues on its own.

My fellow commissioners supported the idea, and we established a hearing on the concept for the first week in January of 1980. Soon after the order was issued, Governor Hunt called me and said that he wanted to testify at the hearing in favor of the concept. In the two months prior to the hearing, I met with several groups at the Governor’s request, to explain the concept.

The Commission approved the concept after public hearings and receiving almost unanimous support for it, and the Alternative Energy Corp. was formed. The name was changed in 1997 to avoid confusion with our overall purpose. I think this was the first or maybe the second so-called “public benefit” fund formed within the U.S. Now a number of states have them.

Photo: Advanced Energy

Advanced Energy works as a global consultant for energy efficiency. Was it originally envisioned in that way or was the original mission to work within North Carolina?

Our original thought was that it would work only in North Carolina, and it remained that way for about the first 10 years. It was mainly a grant-giving organization during those years, with some projects being carried on by the staff.

I resigned from the Commission and assumed the leadership of Advanced Energy after the Corporation was about nine years old, when the first director left for a position in Oak Ridge.

The company had done a lot of good things and had gotten a good bit of favorable publicity for all that it had done. However, I thought we could do more by having more expertise on staff as opposed to trying to find outside contractors most of the time. So we made the transition, including establishing major laboratories to do testing and training.

Soon we were getting requests for assistance from entities in other states. The Commission approved our expanding beyond North Carolina. One reason was that we were able to expand our internal capabilities by hiring more experts, which then allowed us better resources to train younger workers that we were hiring. All this taken together meant that we could do more for our North Carolina utilities and their customers.

What are the most exciting developments Advanced Energy is pursuing?

Advanced Energy's Plug-In Hybrid Electric School Bus Media Event in Raleigh on May 17, 2007

That’s a very difficult question because we are involved in so many cutting-edge projects. We are heavily involved in the technical aspects of electric cars (plug-ins and all-electric), testing and locating charging stations, etc. In terms of electric motors, which use a huge amount of our overall energy, we have the only independent electric and drive motor test facility in North American and do a lot of testing of motors that are shipped into this country. We have done some testing of  “hub” motors that could theoretically be used to transform existing cars into “plug-ins.” We have also assisted other countries in setting up testing labs–most recently, South Korea.

We are working closely with the Department of Energy (DOE) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We are collaborating with the DOE and National Renewable Energy Laboratory on the preparation of the national standards for retrofits for houses by bringing together experts from around the country. For EPA, we are preparing the training manuals for their new Energy Star housing requirements taking effect in 2012.

Tell me about NC GreenPower.

We operate NC GreenPower as a separate company. We initiated this non-profit in 2002 at the request of the Utilities Commission, following a request from a legislative committee. I think NCGP has done a lot to lay the groundwork for more renewable generation in North Carolina, particularly, in terms of showing that renewables could be safely added to the grid.

You are assuming the leadership of TARDC this year. What has that organization meant to you?

I have been a member for several years. I am reminded of Claude McKinney’s comment (he was the designer and director of NCSU’s Centennial Campus) that “education is a contact sport.” He wanted the campus to be a place for research to be done by both industry and the university and he made sure that we were in “contact” by location of the building and by the formation of partnerships. And his vision is being carried on today.

I think TARDC serves some of the same purposes. It brings together people and helps all of us know what is going on in the Triangle and how we might benefit in some way from that knowledge.

For more information on participating in TARDC, please contact Cara Rousseau at tardc@rtp.org or 919.549.8181.

Dr. Anu Sud talks to Robby Fisher, a Durham student participating in the Scientifica program she helped found.

Dr. Anu Sud’s two daughters were accomplished in science by the time they were in high school, in part thanks to coaching by their mother, who had been a cytogeneticist at UNC-Chapel Hill and at LabCorps. The older daughter attended the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, and the younger, Shivani, won a $100,000 scholarship in the Intel Science Talent Search and numerous other top science honors when she was a junior and senior at Jordan High School.

When Shivani went off to Princeton, Dr. Sud was like many professional women who interrupt their careers to raise kids: should she return to her former career or try a new path? Then Shivani said to her, “Mom, why not help other kids like you helped us?”

She went to Dr. Carl Harris, then superintendant of Durham Public Schools, and out of their joint vision, she says, Scientifica was founded. This unique program exposes Durham Public School kids to scientific research being conducted at local universities and companies. The kids are mentored by students at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill and are given the opportunity to conduct research during summer internships.

Now Dr. Sud feels that she has 300 kids—the approximate number who have benefited from Scientifica through internships and science club programs in the last two years.

The program’s mission is to create an environment in Durham schools where excellence in science is fostered. That kind of excellence cannot always be achieved by classroom instruction and book reading.

Students who complete Scientifica internships present their research to fellow students. By excelling in research and public presentation, they become positive role models to their peers.

Many of the undergraduate mentors come from the ranks of A.B. Duke, Robertson, and Morehead Scholars—some of the top students at Duke and UNC. They are able to tell the students how they got to their high level of achievement, which was often by participating in science fairs and other extracurricular programs. Sometimes professors come to talk to classes, and last year, a Duke professor’s lab adopted a middle school classroom for two days, dividing them into small groups and teaching them how to isolate DNA.

The heart of the program is the summer internship program, where students not only complete a research project but learn from mentors how to write up research results and present them to their classmates. The hope is that the student participants will extend the reach of the program by impressing their classmates with how comfortable they’ve become doing research and presenting it publicly.

A grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund now offers both the students and their mentors the ability to receive a stipend for their summer of science.

Scientifica is broadening its reach by forming science clubs at many of the public schools and by creating teams to compete in science fairs and other competitions like Envirothon and the International Robotics Competition. For the latter, Durham public high school students joined with peers at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. “It was an amazing experience for our students, both the competition and the partnership with Science and Math,” Dr. Sud says.

Durham students prepare for the International Robotics Competition. They had six weeks to design and build a robot.

The competition boosted the students' physics and engineering knowledge as well as their interpersonal skills.

Students and their volunteer academic coaches worked after school for five hours every day for six weeks to design and build a robot. Participating in the project was a great way to learn physics, says Dr. Sud. The robot had to navigate a bump, which meant the students had to figure out the size of wheels that could handle that angle. “Things like that you can’t as easily learn in books,” she says.

Terry Crystal presents her research project.

Working in a group, they also had to develop real-life skills like negotiation and showing your best side, she says.

Scientifica’s programs are designed for students who have already shown a commitment to and aptitude for science. Sometimes, those kids need an extra boost, and there are few programs available for them, Dr. Sud says. She remembers a girl in the program, Terry Chrystal, a B student who did research internships two summers in a row at Duke. After the first year, she thought she’d be happy getting into any college. After the second year, she was talking Duke and Yale.

“This program gave her that confidence,” says Dr. Sud.

More information on Scientifica, including application forms, is available here. View a video about the program produced by Durham Public Schools here.

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.”

A concentrated photovoltaic "solar tree" designed by MegaWatt Solar. (Image from MegaWatt Solar web site.)

I recently wrote a two-part post here reporting on a forum in Research Triangle Park which focused on barriers to homegrown global business innovation in the Triangle and in North Carolina. While contemplating the themes of the forum, and skimming today’s science news, I stumbled across this article in  Popular Mechanics magazine which looks into the advances in concentrated photovoltaics over the past few years — and leads with the example of MegaWatt Solar, a renewable energy start-up in our own backyard. The company was formed by three professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who seek to create utility-scaled concentrated photovoltaic systems to supplement fossil fuels-based energy production. (They’ve also been featured in UNC’s Endeavors research magazine, and have landed a story or two in the News & Observer, no longer available in their web archives.)

It struck me that MegaWatt Solar is a good example of the applied research that our area universities can generate to solve real-world problems, and also of the links that can be established between professors with marketable ideas and business-savvy entrepreneurs that can help carry the ideas from the research bench to the bank. Their story is truly one of homegrown innovation, though to be fair they are still in the pilot study phase and working out some kinks.

Because I’ve already written this story, I’m not going to write it again… Below is a reprint of the cover story article I penned about the people behind MegaWatt Solar, and their mission, for the fall 2009 issue of UNC College of Arts & Sciences magazine. It is reprinted here with full permission from the editors.

UNC Arts & Science cover, fall 2009, with MegaWatt Solar founders.

The Power of 20 Suns

MegaWatt Solar is a small start-up energy company in Hillsborough, N.C., backed by $17 million from Norwegian venture capitalists and mentally powered by three researchers in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. Tucked away in a brick textile-mill-turned-office-park, the company is poised to bring a new concentrated photovoltaic system to market that could provide the cheapest large-scale renewable source of electricity available anywhere.

But they didn’t design it for your home. They designed it for your utility company, to offset peak energy demand, which tends to coincide with the sunniest portions of the solar day. The term MegaWatt describes their goal of producing one megawatt of electricity from over a thousand solar “trees” spread across about 10 acres. The solar trees rotate on a dual axis mount that tracks the sun across the sky vault. One megawatt of electricity — one million watts — is enough to power about 800 homes.

MegaWatt Solar was founded by astrophysicist Chris Clemens, theoretical physicist Charles Evans, computer scientist Russ Taylor and a private sector power-grid systems engineer, Dan Gregory. They built their alpha version in spring 2006 in Evans’ driveway from what he describes as “an aluminum erector set for adults,” with parts bought off E-Bay, cheap advertising signboard and a highly reflective material scavenged from the interior of a Solotube skylight.

The best part? It worked.

“Boy, it was bright, “Evans said. “Everyone ran to get their sunglasses.”

They measured its electrical output and knew they were on to something red hot. The alpha reflector had a concentrating factor of 24:1. However, the team reduced this to 20:1 in their final design, to balance limitations from excessive heat buildup with low-cost solutions. Still, the power of 20 suns is impressive.

Since that weekend science project, the researchers have ruthlessly honed their design in an iterative process. They are on their fourth version, which uses four trough-shaped mirrors to produce about 0.75 kilowatts, and Clemens thinks they are nearing the finish line. He believes they will have a marketable product within a year that produces 1 kilowatt. A power utility would need to install about 1,000 of the concentrated solar trees, which Taylor estimates would take about 10 acres, to produce one megawatt. From the get-go, the trio wanted the design to be as low-cost as possible.

Rows of photovoltaic cells engineered to receive 20 times the concentration of normal sunlight. (Image from MegaWatt Solar web site.)

They have one pilot project in Caswell County, where Piedmont Electric Membership Corporation has installed sixteen 12-mirror solar trees. The team is retro-fitting the units to address wind demands, but they expect the new solar plant to be online by December, when they will begin field-testing them. A second pilot project is planned in Florida. They are also field testing six units that are located a stone’s throw from their Hillsborough office. MegaWatt’s solar trees are modular in design, to allow for periodic upgrades in a fast-paced technological world. Clemens, whose background is in astronomical instrumentation, designed the rough concept for the unit, and Evans focused on perfecting the light collecting and concentrating system.

“One of our mantras was that because the mirrors are the component that would cover a lot of ground, they had to pretty much be cheaper than dirt,” Evans said. They settled on an inexpensive exterior signboard material called Dibond, topped with a 3M film. Clemens jokes that it is the “cheapest mirror known to man,” but its 94 percent reflectivity and extremely light-weight aluminum frame are no joke. Taylor and his team worked on the computing that drives the dual-axis mechanical and optical tracking system. His team designed software that learns and anticipates where the reflectors need to be, and directs them there. This software allows the units to be installed anywhere on earth, he said, and within three days the unit will learn all it needs to know to track the sun and keep the reflectors in the right place.

Clemens and Evans extensively researched other concentrated photovoltaic projects and picked the best elements from them. A central key to their process was using existing technologies and materials, which kept costs down. MegaWatt Solar does not plan to mass produce the solar trees. Rather, they plan to work directly with interested utilities, license the design to large engineering firms, and advise local contractors on the construction and parts-purchasing.

They’re not the first to propose concentrating light to make more efficient use of photovoltaic cells. But they may be the first to do it cheaply, reliably and at a utility scale.