UW’s innovation leader

The med school leads the way in commercializing research

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Robert Golden, dean of the UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health for the past dozen years, leaned into the question as if he wanted no doubt to exist on where he stood. We were in his office in a campus building located a stone’s throw away from University Hospital.

I had asked him why it was important that the medical school do a better job of accommodating clinical trials for new drugs and techniques sponsored by for-profit corporations.

Golden swings for the fences.

“This gets to our very core. It is fundamental to the Wisconsin Idea,” he says, citing the university’s historic role as a vessel of knowledge to the state and beyond. “We should not be insular. We should not have ivy-covered walls keeping us from people, keeping us from promulgating advanced health and economic development.”

Richard Moss, a senior associate dean for basic research, seconds the point. “We look at clinical trials as the frontline of bringing therapeutics into the future.”

This is surprising talk coming from an organization that, as we reported two weeks ago, has been accused of being next to impossible to work with, including by Kevin Conroy, CEO of high-flying Exact Sciences, the cancer-testing innovator.

Yes, UW-Madison is one of the great universities in the world, spending more than $1 billion in research funding a year. But increasingly there are complaints of sclerotic bureaucracy hampering research, indifference or hostility to business-supported projects, and an undistinguished record of launching tech startups from that bounty of research.

(For one such flash point, see a story at isthmus.com on how UW’s Waisman Center declined to participate in developing a new blood test to detect autism.)

Golden put his finger on why change is imperative: The Wisconsin Idea requires it. That lodestone of the university mission was memorably captured by UW President Charles Van Hise in 1905 when he said, “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family of the state.”

More than empty rhetoric, the Wisconsin Idea has deep roots in this state. They begin in 1862 with President Abraham Lincoln signing the Morrill Act, which established a national network of land-grant universities funded by the sale of federal land. UW-Madison was a charter member.

The land-grant mission was not the classical education fostered by the elite Harvards and Yales but a more practical education demanded by the times for farming and technical training. The UW’s experimental agricultural stations and county farm agents got their start here. Add in the civic idealism promoted by Milwaukee’s socialists and La Follette’s Progressives, and you have the DNA of the expansive Wisconsin Idea that Van Hise put forward in 1905.

The med school, in facing up to its problems, is pushing hard to reconnect to this old promise.

But where the hell is the parking lot?

I was driving around lost, looking for the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research when I spotted Paul DeLuca, the retired UW-Madison provost, waving at me to pull into a spot that is nominally reserved for pregnant women involved in a WIMR study. Fine by me!

The only thing less known than this lot is probably WIMR itself — two massive complexes connected to the University Hospital. They are teeming with next-generation medical researchers, who are a few minutes walk from what U.S. News & World Report ranks the #1 hospital in Wisconsin.

Nearby in seeming helter-skelter placement are the American Family Children’s Hospital, the hulking medical school classroom building (where Golden’s office is) and the Ebling medical library. A few blocks away is the Waisman Center, famed for its study of developmental disabilities. In short, we’re talking about an extraordinary cluster of medical researchers, patients, physicians and students concentrated on the west end of campus.

Thousands of people crossing paths each day, all caught up in the intricate web of health care. When I talk to Golden about it, I ask if all this had been planned when University Hospital moved from its old University Avenue haunts to Highland Avenue in 1978. He laughs. Nope, not at all.

The health care hub was put together piece by piece in the decades that followed. Opportunity and happenstance were in the mix as well as smart planning, which are often the recipe when successful economic clusters transform a community. Think of fields as diverse as computer chip development in Silicon Valley, clothing design in New York, and country music in Nashville.

“We wanted to capitalize on the geography and culture,” Golden says. The research labs are connected to the hospital and to the classrooms of UW’s School of Medicine and Public Health. “The scientists coming in each day will literally share elevators with the doctors and nurses caring for patients,” he explains. “They’ll go to the cafeteria where the patients and families eat. They will get a true organic sense of what they’re working on.”

The same spirit guides the structure of WIMR. It broke away from the centuries-old tradition of siloing disciplines and departments. So biochemistry is not walled off from pharmacology. Instead there is a lung cancer floor where a public health expert might be studying cancer occurrences working next to a researcher investigating the molecular structure of cancer. Nor is there the usual hierarchal separation of professors from students from post-doctoral fellows.

“This is science without walls,” Golden says. “It encourages a communal integrative approach. It’s worked out real well.”

The first thing DeLuca gives me when we stop at his modest emeritus office — he was a professor and later chair of medical physics and a med school vice dean before becoming provost — is a thick sheath of 266 patents dating from the 1970s that attorneys from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation had secured for UW’s all-star medical imaging faculty.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that these patents help save the lives of Wisconsinites and people all over the world. They are — drum roll, please — the manifestation of the Wisconsin Idea in action. But who really knows about it?

UW’s muscular health care hub is overshadowed by more publicized research centers on campus. Namely, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the Morgridge Institute for Research, which share the Discovery Building, and the three “BioStar” laboratory buildings of the nearby Biochemical Sciences Complex. But it’s the overlooked med school complex that seems to excel best at translating basic lab-coat research into breakthrough commercial techniques and products.

“I don’t think many other people on campus are aware of the magnitude of the whole research structure here,” DeLuca confides. Indeed, the two WIMR buildings, which cost $315 million and opened in 2008 and 2014, house about 1,000 people, including 127 faculty researchers.

The place got energy. Staffers move briskly through the halls as if on a mission. First up is Jonathan Engle, an assistant professor in the departments of medical physics and radiology, who I’m surprised to learn got his bachelor’s degree in Islamic political science at Colorado College before flipping to the hard sciences at the University of Utah.

Engle works in the dizzying world of medical imaging — long a wheelhouse of UW research might and tech spinoffs. Think of veteran UW researchers like Rock Mackie, Charles Mistretta and Scott Reeder. Think of next-generation researcher-entrepreneurs like Robert Jeraj and Bryan Bednarz. Think of TomoTherapy, Mackie’s celebrated research spinoff that uses imaging to guide radiation treatment of cancer. (The Middleton firm sold to Accuray for $277 million in 2011.)

My poor reporter’s noggin spins at seeing the elaborate gadgetry for computerized tomography (CT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners. DeLuca helpfully explains that the CT scan will pinpoint where the tumor is in your brain, but won’t distinguish if you happen to be dead or alive. The PET scan, on the other hand, documents the pulsing physiology of the tumor. “It’s different dead versus alive,” says DeLuca.

Overlap the two images and you get — voila! — a truer and more complex picture of a brain lesion than either scanner provides alone.

Somewhere President Van Hise is smiling.

Engle is jazzed by his research. “The whole future of nuclear medicine is probably headed to therapeutics,” he tells me. In other words, from traditional uses in diagnoses to new uses in actual treatment. He’s “already seeing little breakthroughs,” Engle says (as if a cancer disappearing is a small thing) in the treatment of stage four glioblastoma, the most malignant form of brain cancer. That’s what killed U.S. Sen. John McCain.

Engle and his colleagues work closely with med-tech giants like GE Healthcare and Siemens Medical Solutions. And with clinicians on the front lines at the hospital. Their WIMR labs are roughly 500 feet from the University Hospital’s Carbone Cancer Center.

That proximity is critical because the labs make their advanced imaging devices available to clinical patients in the mornings. It would be crazy expensive for the hospital to duplicate this array of equipment, says DeLuca.

Frank Korosec, a medical physicist who runs the UW’s Imaging Science Section, says the clinic connection is invaluable to researchers. “We get lots of leads from radiologists on what they need,” he says. “That helps us figure out better ways of imaging. If we operated in a vacuum, we’d probably be headed in the wrong direction.”

Korosec helped negotiate the university’s current 10-year, $34 million research contract with GE Healthcare in 2012. Their partnership dates back a quarter-century and stands as a high point in UW-Madison’s undistinguished record with business-sponsored research and technology transfer.

“Because we collaborate, it doesn’t mean we give the technology away,” says Korosec. In a nutshell, GE patents what its researchers create and WARF patents what UW researchers create, with GE having the first right to license the UW discoveries.

Among those profitable WARF licenses was a Korosec discovery for vascular imaging called 3D TRICKS (for Time Resolved Imaging of Contrast Kinetics), which tracks blood flow during body scans. He says it’s GE Healthcare’s best-selling application for its magnetic resonance scanners and was licensed by Toshiba and Siemens as well.

The GE Healthcare partnership is bragworthy for the campus.

The company is one of the state’s high-tech stars and among the largest private employers in Wisconsin. Its 46,000 worldwide employees include almost 6,000 in Wisconsin at sites in Madison, Waukesha and Milwaukee. Company revenue topped $19 billion in 2017. And, yes, GE Healthcare is a major recruiter of UW-Madison graduates.

GE also gives UW-Madison first dibs on its newest technology, including placement of its “state-of-the-art” magnetic resonance imaging units. “They want us to kick the tires and check it out,” says Korosec. “Because we have experienced scientists and radiologists, they ask us to evaluate their latest and greatest software. They provide us with a lot of tools that other institutions don’t see until much later.”

That’s the good news.

The bad news is how business relationships continue to vex the campus. More typical is UW’s failure to reach a research agreement with the Ford Motor Co.

The auto giant had wanted a “master agreement” with UW-Madison that set the terms for joint research projects not just for a particular department or center — as is the Madison custom — but across the full campus, which has upwards of 200 separate research entities.

Ford’s interest is potentially huge for UW. The auto industry is facing an existential crisis as Silicon Valley disrupters — including Google’s Waymo, Uber, Lyft, Tesla, and others — try to push their way into the car industry’s driver’s seat. Led by a TED-talk kind of innovative leader named James Hackett, Ford continues to look for more strategic/holistic relationships with top-tier universities for research.

As Business Insider observes, cars aren’t just made of engines and steel these days: “They’re rolling computers that are learning to drive themselves, talk to each other, and generate enormous amounts of lucrative data that’s shared with the cloud. In fact, Ford thinks the data business could generate double the profit margins the company has historically seen on vehicles, potentially as high as 20 percent.”

In late 2017, Susan LaBelle, then head of the UW’s Office of Corporate Relations, cited the failed Ford contract in a candid memo to her boss, Charles Hoslet, in explaining the “stagnant corporate sponsored research at UW-Madison.”

The problem? Well, there were at least two. The breakdown — and backlog — in UW’s contract-negotiating office, and the campus’ strong preference against master contracts.

“Ford wanted a campus-wide master agreement for simplicity,” LaBelle wrote. “We eventually proposed to Ford that we limit the agreement to Engineering to get started, but after three years, we still do not have an agreement...” Make that four years now, according to Hoslet, who is vice chancellor for university relations, though he adds that “conversations” have restarted between Ford and Engineering.

Hoslet makes the point that UW has forged ahead with 25 other master agreements in fiscal year 2018. But this statement is a head-scratcher. He admits that most all of these master pacts pertain only to specific UW research units and are not campus-wide in application.

That’s a big problem for Ford. “Almost all top-tier research universities are now willing to negotiate cross-campus master agreements,” says Ed Krause, Ford’s global manager for external alliances. He describes negotiating with the campus as “uniquely difficult.”

Madison tech veteran Allen Dines says UW’s stubbornness on master contracts is costly: “One of the Ford executives said they figure all great universities are about equal when it comes to getting innovative thinkers. They go to where it’s easiest to get a deal put in place.” That wasn’t UW-Madison.

Instead, Ford partners with top-tier universities like Purdue, Michigan, MIT, Georgia Tech, Stanford and several European centers. At the University of Michigan, Stephen Forrest, a former vice president for research, successfully pushed for the campus to adopt campus-wide master agreements. From the corporate perspective, he explains, master contracts simplify intellectual property issues and project management, while recognizing how surprisingly wide their research needs can be.

“Transportation has huge implications from the social to the economic to the technical, so Ford wants to go to a university with breadth,” Forrest says.

The stakes are huge for UW’s reputation.

While the campus ranks sixth nationally in overall research funding, the National Science Foundation scores it as only 48th for business-sponsored research. The Milken Institute’s calculation for university tech transfer, meanwhile, puts the Madison campus at an unimpressive 40th in the nation based on patents, licensing income and startups.

Still, the med school’s pledge to work better with business stands out on campus. A Milwaukee executive calls it “a bit of a rogue operation.” The diplomatic Rock Mackie dials it back to say “a little bit rebellious.” What isn’t in dispute is the school’s goal to move its research from “bench to bedside.” That is, to apply the insights learned in the laboratory to new ways of treating patients.

For example, the med school launched its own nonprofit in 2014, known as Wi2 (for the Wisconsin Technology Innovation Initiative), to support medical product development by faculty and students. This included creation of a state-supported $1 million seed fund to help Wi2 commercialize medical school research. Among the first recipients: the UW’s Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Institute for its efforts to identify disease markers and treatments.

In 2016, Wi2 also agreed to a strategic collaboration with Orion, a Finnish pharmaceutical and diagnostics company, to develop new cancer treatments — any income generated will be split according to each side’s percentage of investment.

Engle, meanwhile, points out “a significant amount” of the funding for his Cyclotron Research Group comes from the production of radionuclides — unstable atoms that emanate radiation — that are the subject of the group’s research. Through a UW “charge-back” account, the radionuclides are sold at cost to a national network of investigators. Engle credits that revenue for allowing his group to pivot quickly to investigate new topics. (Quickness is not usually a word associated with launching new university research endeavors.)

Finally, the complaints of Exact Sciences’ Kevin Conroy and others have prompted a major internal review by consultant Mary Westrick of med school policies that could better accommodate business-sponsored clinical trials. The problem: While the med school accounts for almost a third of UW’s $1.58 billion research expenditures, just $10 million is spent on clinical trials.

Judging from subterranean rumblings on campus, the med school’s initiatives sometimes face administrative resistance. Campus managers, for good reason or bad, seem to take a harder line on potential conflict-of-interest issues than other universities do, which has complicated launching campus-based startups led by faculty and students.

But fear of public resources being used for personal gain is not unreasonable. The recent tumult at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center — a nonprofit hospital executive overseeing for-profit ventures benefited handsomely from stock options in one such startup — is a case in point.

Even a steadfast defender of UW engagement with business like DeLuca recognizes the challenge of faculty startups on campus. “You’re standing on the edge of the abyss,” he says. “We have to be careful here.” For DeLuca, the question comes down to what degree campus leadership “is comfortable hanging toes over the board.”

Hanging toes? It’s surfing lingo for attempting “a difficult maneuver that takes both grace and balance,” according to Google. That’s the perfect metaphor for UW’s challenge to bring the Wisconsin Idea into the 21st century. 

Part III in the series will look at the UW’s conflicted commitment to building an entrepreneurial culture on campus. All the stories in this series on UW-Madison research can be found at isthmus.com/topics/uws-challenge/