President Obama at Cree's manufacturing plant in Durham. Photo: Wall Street Journal

On his visit Monday to Cree’s Durham manufacturing plant President Obama brought his advisors from the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness along to impress on North Carolinians that his administration is focused on lowering the stubbornly high U.S. unemployment rate, which in May was 9.1 percent.

Jobs council members, which come from the business sector, labor and universities, are dedicating their time and energy to one singular task, Obama told Cree workers. “How do we create more jobs in America?”

Not far from where Obama was talking about getting out of the Great Recession, a job creation effort was under way to lower the state unemployment rate, which in April was 9.7 percent, and particularly the unemployment rate in the Research Triangle, which in April was at 7 percent in the Durham-Chapel Hill area and at 7.7 percent in the Raleigh-Cary area.

NCSU, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have long been engines of economic development in the region. They drove the formation of Research Triangle Park in the 1950s and educated the work force that attracted corporate research and development operations to RTP in the following three decades. The three universities that anchor RTP have also brought about technologies that started many an R&D company in the area.

Cree itself is a NCSU spinoff. The RTP company that makes light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, was formed in 1987 based on technology developed at NCSU.

With budget cuts for higher education looming, Triangle universities are stepping up and retooling their economic development efforts.

At NCSU, Terri Lomax, vice chancellor for research and innovation, is taking on responsibilities starting July 1 to help the state recruit companies and jobs, and the university is trying to boost the formation of spinoffs and their chances to survive and expand, be acquired or go public.

William Woodson, who was named NCSU chancellor in January 2010, established an innovation fund that will provide $2.5 million over the next five years to NCSU researchers to work on technologies that could be licensed or spun out as a company. To get off the ground, the young companies could tap into expertise at the university through a so-called proof-of-concept center on NCSU’s Centennial Campus.

To further accelerate startup formation, NCSU has joined forces with UNC, Duke, the Council for Entrepreneurial Development and N.C. Central University. The consortium is getting involved in the Blackstone Entrepreneurs Center, which has $3.6 million available over three years to evaluate technologies and tutor new companies.

“Most new jobs come from companies less than five years old,” Lomax said in an interview with Science in the Triangle. “We want to do everything we can to help these companies be successful. Especially after a recession that’s extremely important.”

She suggested that the efforts could double the number of successful startups that NCSU spins out per year to 10 to 12 by 2015.

“What we want is sustained economic development,” Lomax said.

Watch the entire Science in the Triangle interview with Terri Lomax here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

To prepare for and support NASA missions, researchers at N.C. State University have studied how to more precisely land a vessel on Mars and how to grow plants in a spacecraft operating in zero gravity.

But NASA’s involvement in North Carolina goes further. Since 1991, teachers and students at North Carolina universities, community colleges and public schools have received about $15 million to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics, to research issues related to space missions and to work in companies contracting with NASA.

Funding for the research grants, scholarships and summer internships has been provided through the N.C. space grant, a program administered at NCSU.

Christopher Brown

“The goal is to keep the pipeline filled for NASA,” Christopher Brown, director of the N.C. space grant, told members of the Triangle Area Research Directors Council who gathered this week at Research Triangle Park headquarters.

But “this isn’t just rockets and aerospace,” Brown said. Space grant projects in North Carolina include satellite tracking of red wolves and the development of an undergraduate robotics course at Duke University.

As a professor of plant biology at NCSU, Brown teaches a space biology class and some of his plant experiments will travel to the international space station on the last shuttle flight scheduled to take off in August.

NASA funds the N.C. space grant and similar programs in all other states through its annual budget.

In the past five years, the total for these grants has increased from about $30 million to $45.6 million. North Carolina’s portion is about $800,000 annually, Brown said. That includes a state match. The match used to be about $200,000 per year, but budget cuts have reduced it to $180,000.

N.C. space grant beneficiaries

Federal cuts are also looming, but Brown said he didn’t think the program would be eliminated, because every Congressional district receives money. For fiscal year 2012, which starts Oct. 1, President Obama’s budget request for the space grant program is $26.5 million, according to NASA budget information. That’s a reduction of more than 40 percent.

In the past, N.C. space grant money has supported research of young university faculty, helped develop new college courses and paid for professional development of K-12 teachers, provided scholarships and summer internships for graduate and undergraduate students and students at community colleges.

Thirteen university campuses across North Carolina are affiliated with the N.C. space grant, from UNC Asheville to Elizabeth City State University.

That one size doesn’t fit all in understanding and treating disease is a topic for casual conversation around water coolers in many places. In North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park area, it’s a reason to hold a conference.

Dozens of epidemiologists, nurses and community activists spent a whole day talking about health disparities and research to abolish them at N.C. Central University, where the second Clinical Research Education Day took place Saturday.

They talked about the Diabetes Improvement Project in Durham, for example. Launched in 2005, it’s an effort by Duke University, community organizations and churches to improve the health of African American diabetes patients. Diabetes is one of five conditions which disproportionally affect minorities; HIV/AIDS, cancer, cardiovascular diseases and obesity are the other four.

From left, Cheryl Woods Giscombe, Lori Carter Edwards and Sharon Elliott-Bynum.

They talked about the African American Collaborative Obesity Research Network, or AACORN, a Philadelphia-based initiative that has collaborators at several universities in the RTP area. And they talked about how research programs team up with community activists to overcome racism in biomedical research and to recruit more minority participants for studies.

“No more Tuskegee,” said Sharon Elliott-Bynum, a nurse and founder of CAARE, a community initiative that provides services to homeless veterans, substance abusers, HIV/AIDS patients and seniors. She was referring to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, one of the worst examples of unethical biomedical research in the U.S.

“You can be an agent of change,” Elliott-Bynum added. “But you’ve got to be at the table.”

In an interview with Science in the Triangle, Elliott-Bynum, Lori Carter Edwards of Duke University and Cheryl Woods Giscombe of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill talked about how to improve research and get the study results to address health disparities. Listen to the audiotaped interview:

Kennedy’s job duties will receive much attention at public education workshops Saturday at N.C. Central University in Durham. The workshops are hosted by the Center for Information and Study of Clinical Research Participation as part of the nonprofit’s East Coast campaign to get more people, particularly more minorities, interested in participating in clinical trials.

About 25 percent of all clinical trials are run by contract research organizations such as Quintiles, but over the next few years drugmakers are expected to farm out as many as 35 percent of all trials.

North Carolina’s Research Triangle area is home to more CROs than any other place in the U.S. Quintiles, which is based in Durham, is the largest CRO in the world and a strong supporter of CISCRP. Kara Lemons, a quality assurance manager at Quintiles, will participate on one of the workshop panels.

Kennedy told Science in the Triangle why the workshops, billed as Clinical Research Education Day, are so important.

Q: How big a problem is patient recruitment for clinical trials?

A: Difficulties in recruiting enough patients to enroll in clinical trials is the main reason why trials don’t start on time and trial results are delayed.

A lot of scary stories have been published about what can go awry in clinical trials. “I don’t want to give the impression that this doesn’t happen. But the scary stories aren’t always balanced. Controls are in place to govern clinical trials.”

There isn’t one big solution to make patient recruitment easier. The workshops are aimed at providing information about who oversees and monitors clinical trials and about patients’ rights to make people more comfortable about participating in clinical trials.

Q: What do you hope people will take away from the workshops?

A: “I would love to see the clinical trial experience demystified. If they want to participate in a clinical trial, there is so much information out there.”

Multiple regulatory layers exist to ensure patients’ safety and to protect their rights and their welfare. The layers include Food and Drug Administration inspectors, independent review boards and internal auditors at clinical research companies.

I hope the workshops raise public awareness about what it means for patients to have the right of informed consent. “So many people think of informed consent as a document you sign. It’s really a process that includes a lot of dialog.”

As part of that dialog, patients should be able to ask questions – What procedures will they undergo during the trial? What is the chance of getting the experimental medicine? What are the known or potential side effects of the drug? – and receive answers.

As a patient, “you must be able to make a decision without coersion.”

Q: Two studies published in the past week raise concerns that clinical research still lacks transparency. One study found that the results of fewer than half of the clinical trials sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry are published. Another study found that the published results of clinical trials oftentimes are different from what the trial was supposed to show. Any comments?

A: I haven’t read the studies and can’t comment on them. What I can say is that Quintiles follows all the requirements of publication of clinical trials.

Q: Why do people participate in clinical trials?

A: Some people feel it’s the only way to gain access to a new treatment. Others do it to serve the greater good, to help other patients. I participated in a clinical trial because I wanted to learn what it is like to be a patient.

“Everybody is doing it for different reasons. But you have to make sure it’s right for you.”

There’s a reason for all the goodies. Organizers want people to stay and listen — to speakers like Dr. Robert Califf, who heads Duke University’s Clinical Research Institute; Dr. Wendy Brewster, director of women’s health research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and executives from Quintiles Transnational and PPD, two North Carolina companies that help drugmakers test new medicines.

Hosted by the Center for Information and Study of Clinical Research Participation, the public education workshops at NCCU are part of an East Coast campaign aimed at getting more people, particularly more minorities, interested in participating in clinical trials.

Event details:

When: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 12.

Registration and free breakfast to begin at 9 a.m.

Where: NCCU’s H.M. Michaux School of Education, 712 Cecil St., Durham

The Triangle, home of one of the largest number of companies helping drugmakers to test new therapies, is one of four places where CISCRP is organizing the workshops for the first time. Similar events took place in the spring in Philadelphia and Baltimore. A fourth one is planned next month in Boston.

The reason for the campaign is that it’s becoming harder and harder for the pharmaceutical industry to recruit patients for the tests, which are crucial to determine whether new medicines work safely and are fit to be sold.

Contract drug research is a multi-billion-dollar business. In the Triangle along, thousands work in the industry. But recruiting and retaining patients has become a huge hurdle, delaying approval of new drugs and increasing the cost of drug development.

In the past 20 years, finding patients to participate in clinical trials has gone from 30 percent of the development costs to 60 percent, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development.

Patient recruitment isn’t keeping up with the rising number of clinical trials, partly because patients worry about possible drug side effects.

CISCRP was founded in 2003 by the former chief executive of CenterWatch, a Boston-based publication that tracks the clinical research industry. The nonprofit is supported by drugmakers and companies and organizations that help them test new medicines.

North Carolina supporters include Quintiles, PPD and companies conducting, analyzing and managing clinical trials. Here is a list of all CISCRP supporters.