TWO DECADES AGO, PROFESSOR VALENTINO STELLA hit upon an intriguing finding while researching drug-delivery platforms at the University of Kansas. By encapsulating non-soluble drugs within an agent that would become known as Capistol, Stella had found a way to vastly improve delivery of drugs within the body.
At the site of action, the Capistol would dissociate from the original drug, which could then go about its work.
In 1993, under license from KU, Stella launched CyDex Pharmaceuticals out of that research. CyDex has since grown to partner with such drug-company notables as Pfizer, Prism and BMS. But academia, says current CEO Theron Odlaug, was the foundation of the company.
Stella’s work broke new ground in pharmaceutical research then, and it continues to play a critical role in development of new drugs. Up to 90 percent of those in the pipeline now are believed to have problems with low solubility, according to Chemical & Engineering News, creating enormous opportunities for Capistol’s abilities.
The CyDex story, though, doesn’t end with commercialization: In January, the company announced that it had reached an agreement to be acquired by Ligand Pharmaceuticals of LaJolla, Calif. The price tag on that deal? Potentially more than $100 million.
Not all academic research, of course, will yield such a demonstrably solid return on the investment. But Stella’s experience clearly demonstrates the power of academic research, and its potential for rebuilding the economies not just of Kansas and Missouri, but the country as a whole, says many professionals working in the research sector.
Killing the Golden Goose?
Not long after CyDex launched, Bell Labs researcher Andrew Odlyzko penned a white paper exploring a disturbing trend that he feared would imperil unfettered research in the private sector. The pressure to answer to stockholders and analysts, he argued, was producing short-term thinking in research funding and practices.
Academic research, he suggested, would fill that vacuum. Fulfilling that prophecy on a personal level, Odlyzko went to work at the University of Minnesota in 2001, but the past decade has brought him a new realization: The same boardroom-driven pressures from the private sector have morphed into public policy concerns. Virtually every state legislature in the country is wrestling with nine-figure budget demons this year, and a frequent refrain in public policy debates about academic research and product commercialization has become “Show me the money.”
“Industry has become more short-term-oriented,” Odlyzko says. “Now, when we go and plead for money from state and federal legislators, they listen to what business says, and business is telling them that ‘It’s OK for pointy-headed academics in ivory towers to work on some of this stuff, but we need something we can develop quickly.’ ” “The danger in that,” he says, “is that you lose the real fundamental innovations that drive the whole enterprise to a short-term focus.”
Top-level administrators at research offices on campuses in this region vary in how strongly they concur with Odlyzko’s assessment of current conditions. But at some level, all agree that the research mission on campus is under a microscope as never before, and that the pressure to deliver the goods on product commercialization has been ratcheted up. There’s some good in that, they say, because it ensures a sharp focus on where administrators are directing their research efforts.
Keeping those efforts on track with proven successes isn’t merely a matter of protecting institutional turf at budget time, administrators say. Research efforts have far greater implications for Missouri and Kansas than research done simply for the sake of new knowledge:
• For the two-state region, well more than $1 billion in economic activity is generated as a result of research programs when factoring in federal program spending, business spending on fee-for-service arrangements and more.
• For local economies and the work force, economic development is leading to creation of new kinds of post-manufacturing-era jobs in what is being hailed as the Knowledge Economy. Regional research activity is attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in private money from companies partnering with academic researchers and from venture-capital firms.
• For students, who have shouldered an ever-increasing share of the costs of college while the portion from state funding has declined, the additional revenue streams at universities can help bend the cost curve.
• For universities themselves, changes in research approaches have wrought a new way of doing business. Pressed by a relentless need to shrink the timelines
for commercializing innovative products, universities are breaking down campus silos and embracing new levels of collaboration across academic disciplines.
The Research Trigger
The course of academic research in the U.S. was dramatically altered in 1980, when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act. That opened the door for universities to recruit private-sector partners for development and commercialization of research, allowing the campuses, rather than federal agencies, to retain royalties from research developments. An unforeseen consequence of that, some campus administrators say, is that companies saw an opportunity to transfer some of the high costs of R&D to public-sector institutions, and began winding down some of their own operations.
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