By Dan McCue

The presidents of the state’s three research universities meet monthly to discuss issues related to Health Sciences South Carolina, and are working aggressively to lure the nation’s best scientists to their campuses as endowed chairs through the Research Centers of Excellence Act.

The program is one of the things that makes South Carolina’s march toward an innovation economy unique, said University of South Carolina President Andrew Sorensen.

Already it has fostered strong collaborations in the health sciences, biomedical and bioengineering fields.

“In some cases, the lines are significantly blurred,” said Medical University of South Carolina President Ray Greenburg. “For instance, in the case of Dr. John Schaefer, who uses mannequin-based simulators to improve clinical effectiveness and patient safety, we were all involved in recruiting him, so I feel that, while he lives in Charleston, he’s really a professor for all of us.”

But because not every endowed chair is a shared position it has also helped the schools to bolster their individual identities. For example, the four endowed chairs approved for the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research are Clemson chairs.

“And that’s true in a number of instances,” Sorenson said. “Because Clemson is the only one of the three universities to have a school of architecture, it will be the lead institution when an endowed chair for historic preservation is hired. Similarly, USC and MUSC have taken the lead on the endowed chairs related to medicine and pharmacology. We’re not competing as we would on the football field. We’re having rational discussions to determine the best way to benefit us all.”

Clemson President James Barker said the review and approval process set forth in the Research Centers of Excellence Act works this way: The universities submit proposals for new endowed chairs to a nine-member review board, which looks at the new chairs based on existing strengths and research expertise at the respective institutions, along with the commitment of institutional resources.

The board then uses outside experts to help it review each proposal. After a program is approved, the university must match the state commitment with private funds. Only then can the university begin the search for potential candidates to fill the chair.

Scientists call the play, entrepreneurs carry the ball
The economic benefits of the endowed chairs program are two-fold, Sorensen said. Because the chairs are essentially assigned to the institution with strength in their discipline, a lot of the infrastructure they need is already in place at one site, but their professorships extend beyond a single campus.

“It can cost a couple of million dollars to set up a laboratory, so it’s a tremendous help to USC if one of our endowed chairs can utilize facilities at MUSC and save us those costs,” Sorensen said.

The other economic benefit is the creation of new businesses in the state. As an example of what Sorensen would like to see happen as the endowed chair program moves forward, he points to Michael Myrick, a USC chemist who is not an endowed chair. Myrick came up with a laser-based process for checking pharmaceuticals for impurities while they are still liquid, meaning they can be refined before they are manufactured into pill form.

Big pharmaceutical companies want such a system because impurities found at a later stage could halt production of a drug and potentially cost them millions of dollars.

“Michael and I had a discussion about his work and ultimately concluded that it was more important that he continue his research than become a CEO,” Sorensen said.

Enter Walter Alessandrini, a former CEO of two companies who recently had retired to South Carolina.

Feeling restless, he formed Ometric Corp., the Columbia, S.C.-based company that is now developing for commercial applications for the process Myrick created.

“The typical path for these things is for the researcher to file a disclosure with the university, basically saying, ‘I have this exciting idea.’ Then we have our patent attorneys meet with him and put him into an incubator with science and business students to begin fashioning a business model for his proposed product,” Sorensen said.

“Walter’s job, when we brought him in on this, was to find the venture capital necessary to bring the company to fruition. In this case, he brought in Sequoia Capital, a big venture capital firm from the West Coast.”

Since then, AFT Ventures and Trelys Funds, both also based in Columbia, have invested in the company.

If the endowed chairs are now the poster men and women of collaboration for the sake of innovation, they are not the only example.