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Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium (2013)

Chapter: Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives

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Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
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Panel III

Illinois Innovation Initiatives

Moderator:
William Testa
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Dr. Testa introduced himself as director of Midwestern research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, where he works to analyze the Midwest economy, “including its technologies and initiatives.” He said that after 30 years of studying the Midwest, he sees today that many regions “are trying to re-establish their entrepreneurial DNA.” He sees places such as Detroit, northwest Ohio, and others “trying to find what they lost, and the innovative impulse behind what they had done in constructing the Midwest.”

In comparing these initiatives, he said, he sees that Chicago and Illinois have at least two of the three assets. One is its entrepreneurial bent, which had never been lost to mass production as it had been elsewhere. Chicago had always been the business capital, and had never been a one-industry town dependent on mass production. It continued to support new firms, business services, and finance, as well as manufacturing. Also, it had always been a place of immigrants, who “self-select—they bring that impulse to innovate, they have to build new businesses. Those that have come from afar tend to be the most ambitious, he said. Chicago is located far from both the South and East. “We have that impulse and capacity to build technology transfer and new industries,” he said.

“But from the literature,” he continued, “what we know about Chicago is that there is a yawning gap between our capacity and what we produce in new startups and businesses. In the last decade, we were in the top eight cities in NIH funding, but we had very few biotech startups. ”What we lack,” Dr. Testa said, “is the programs, the institutional capacity, the coming together from both bottom up and top down to translate and put technology into commercialization.”

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
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He welcomed the panel, and asked each member to address these issues and the task of “building an innovation culture and making science exciting to the people of Chicago.”

INSPIRING INNOVATION

Julio Ottino
McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
Northwestern University

Dr. Ottino said he would talk about the role of the university as an element of the complex innovation ecosystem “and how we see our contribution.” Universities are only one part of this ecosystem, he said, intertwined with high-tech employers, venture capital, government, and a foundation of intellectual protection. But because “talent is the critical element of the ecosystem,” and part of the university’s mission is to nurture this talent, the responsibility of the university is high. In the case of Northwestern, he said, as with Stanford, Princeton, and other top universities, retention is not a problem, and the universities have the opportunity to do their best for students. “About 94 percent of the students who start with us finish with us,” he said.

The McCormick School, established just over a century ago in 1909, has a budget of $98 million, supporting 182 full-time faculty, 95 adjunct lecturers, 196 staff, about 1600 undergraduates, 820 PhD students, 300 postdocs, 300 departmental masters, and 400 professional masters. The research budget is about $125 million a year.36 The school is large and complex, he said, but “at the core” it produces two things: ideas and people. The ideas, he said, can be papers, intellectual property, tangible innovations, or even a style of thinking. Deciding what kind of talent the school should produce is not so simple, he said. “For this we need to read the future. I often say, life is like driving in an impenetrable fog; in front we can only see five feet away, but in the rear view mirror, everything is perfectly clear. We prepare for the future by focusing on the development of our students’ thinking skills that will serve them for the long haul.”

In engineering, he said, the foundation of education is analytical skills—logical, left-brain thinking; rational, analytic, pattern seeking; solution solving; sorting and organizing. The people who come to the school, he said, do a good job of self-selection, “and we can pick the best.”

Analytical skills are essential for problem solving, he went on, but “there is no big prize for correctly solving what turns out to be the incorrect problem.” In order to truly educate the engineers who are the best prepared to deal with the challenges ahead, “we need to instill an additional skill: divergent,

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36The engineering school was named in 1989 after Robert R. McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune and descendent of Cyrus McCormick, co-inventor of the mechanical reaper and founder of the company that became International Harvester in 1902. The McCormick Foundation and other members of the family also helped support Northwestern’s schools of journalism and law.

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

right-brain thinking, which includes metaphorical thinking and intuition. This skill allows us to frame problems and connect them to the big picture, not to just randomly and instantly solve them as they come to us. In short, innovation requires both sides of the brain, and people who are not afraid of anything. If there is something to be learned, they will learn it. If there is something to be learned, they will learn it. We want people to have that breadth.”

The goal, he went on, is to produce leaders who thrive at the intersection between disciplines, between theory and application, and between global problems and the knowledge needed to solve them. The innovation landscape consists of many pieces, and the challenge is to learn how they can fit. This landscape is like a city, and this is good, because it mimics reality. Cities can be chaotic, and maybe inefficient, but they are stable. You can bomb a city and it will be reborn.

“Cities also change over time,” he continued. “It’s tough to predict, for example, where the arty neighborhoods will emerge in a city. But cities are also magnets for creativity, innovation, and economic output. They are organized, and organization correlates with wealth. More than half of the world population now lives in cities, generating about 80 percent of global output.”

He said that innovation happens in many ways: one is structured, the other is unstructured. At McCormick, the most structured approach is offered through the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in a course called NUvention; Medical Innovation, launched in 2007. The format combines students from McCormick, the law school, the Kellogg School of Management, and the Feinberg School of Medicine. The students pool their knowledge and insights with the objective of producing new medical devices. “They have been extremely successful,” said Dr. Ottino, “and this week, one of the teams won the tech week launch competition.” That course has been joined by similar programs focusing on web, energy, social entrepreneurship, and digital media.“

The second route to innovation, he said, is design, which is less structured. McCormick students encounter design and design thinking from the first week they arrive. They are put into teams where they learn to solve problems. “But what they learn to uncover is the main issue behind the perceived problem. When you are 18 or 19 your brain is plastic; it is open to new ways of thinking. These skills stay with people and they carry them through their career. This is different from the typical engineering curriculum, where design is only encountered at the end.”

He mentioned also Design for America, a group started at McCormick three years ago to use design for social impact. It has quickly spread through Northwestern and now has chapters at Cornell, Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, UCLA, the University of Oregon, and other universities. Several students have established their own companies based on Design for America projects, including two working in the Health Box incubator in Chicago.

He said that like many of the government officials in attendance, University administrators are the recipients of lots of free advice. One area of advice is often about customization of degrees, allowing the student to take only

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

courses they like. “A fitting analogy,” he said, “is music. In the past, you had to buy CDs, but now you can buy singles from iTunes. A CD is like a four-year degree, which may include songs you don’t like. The single is the future. Why buy songs you don’t like? This approach depends on viewing the student as customers, which they are, but the university is one of the few businesses in which the customer is also the product.

“The university is one of the few businesses in which the customer is also the product. The entire value of the university resides in the people that the university has produced. My entire reputation depends on the supply of people who are out there still alive doing great things. That’s why the university is so slow to change things. Students may be forced to take courses they don’t like, and they don’t have the perspective to understand why. However, it is the finished individual that counts. An album of collected singles has value only in the context of the whole album. Using the same music analogy, a composed album beats a set of disconnected singles. Hopefully the people here get an integrated experience along with their education.

“The second class of advice is what I call attacking the obvious, the future that is five feet in front of you. This is connecting education to immediate needs. Some universities offer specialized degrees in supply-chain management or specific aspects of solar power to solve real-world problems. But preparing to solve real-world problems presupposes we know what they are going to be. The reality is that we see only what’s just ahead, right in front of us. Every generation misses the real problems right in front of their noses because they are looking only in the rear-view mirror. Why do we think we are different and that we can read the future?

“This approach resembles the specialized degrees given in the Soviet Union about gear making,” he said. “Or degrees on making CD-ROMs without wondering how useful that would be in the year 2040. The value of engineering is not in what one makes; what one makes will change with time. The real value is the way engineers think. They should think for the long haul. We should prepare people for the future that we cannot see. It’s true that we need to hedge our bets, to focus engineering education on the quantitative stuff, which is non-negotiable. But adding humanities, for example, also seems like a good bet, as is adding anything to the right side of the brain.”

In conclusion, he speculated on Chicago’s advantage in the competition for talented people. “Talent is a competitive advantage. It attracts capital, but more important, it attracts additional talent, and people want to work where the best talent is. New York City offers the features of finance and the arts; San Francisco offers digital consumer technology, Boston biotechnology, LA lifestyle, San Diego telecom, Minneapolis medical devices, and so on. Chicago could offer logistics, transportation, energy, nanotech, architecture, music. But if we integrate a lot of this we find design. No one has claimed the title of design capital yet. Operating at the intersection of so many fields should be our advantage. My job is to produce the kind of talent that can join domains, operate at the intersection, and drive innovation.”

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
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ENGAGING THE PUBLIC IN SUPPORT
OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

David Mosena
Chicago Museum of Science and Industry

Dr. Mosena said that he would take a different angle on innovation to describe what the museum does to inspire the children who would go into Dr. Ottino’s program by making science exciting to them. He said he would also focus on nanoscience as a new field that he was now ready to take to the public at large.

At the museum, he said, “we do a lot of work talking to moms. They are important because most of our visitors are families with middle school children, and the person who makes most of the decisions about what they do on the weekends is the mom. So we talk to them about what drives them, and why they come to the museum.” Their number one concern, he said, is “the future,” and their kids’ education. They are worried about their children’s jobs and about preparing them for tomorrow.

“They all tell us to ‘do more about the future’. They say, we all know we desperately need to build a stronger work force in science and technology if we want to remain the world leader in innovation. The museum’s vision is important. It filters our choices of things to do so that our children can achieve their full potential in fields of science and technology, medicine, and engineering.”

Today’s sixth graders, he said, are going to be entering the work force and voting in 10 years. So middle schoolers are in the early stage of the pipeline. The museum’s responsibility—even in a city the size of Chicago—is a large one. It is number one in total attendance among the museums in Chicago. The Shedd Aquarium is slightly ahead in the number of organized school groups. The museum teaches 20,000 children who attend in-depth learning labs every year, and 5,000 who attend after-school activities. There are 70 science clubs. An important statistics about the public’s awareness of the museum, he said, is that one-half of the attendees are adults without children.

A year and a half ago the museum completed a $200 million capital campaign, and as a result, 85 percent of the museum’s exhibit space is new or renovated. It includes new exhibits, refreshed exhibits, and an enriched education program called the Institute of Quality Science Teaching. “We teach science teachers—especially in middle school—how to teach science. About 70 percent of the middle-school science teachers in Chicago have no background in science. It’s hard to be inspiring if you’re not comfortable in the subject matter.” Over the last five years some 8,500 teachers have attended the museums programs. About 500 have taken coursework in a masters-level science education program offered in partnership with the Illinois Institute of Technology. One result is that 25 percent of the Chicago Public School

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

System’s K-8 schools now have teachers of science who have been trained in a museum program.

Nanoscale science, which has the slogan “Scale changes what’s possible,” connects the public with the extensive nanotechnology activities in the Chicago area. Because Chicago and Illinois are a hub for nano-activity, he said, every aspect of STEM education is influenced.

“The museum is building a beautiful exhibit, which will be the first permanent nanotechnology exhibit in any museum,” he said. The museum has worked with Northwestern University and other organizations to design the $2.5 million program. “Scale is the issue,” he said, “because scale changes what’s possible. A key message is to get guests thinking about ‘small’—how tiny nanoscience really is. These interactive exhibits demonstrate what unique things can happen at the nanoscale and what game-changing innovations are possible in the fields of medicine, energy, electronics, materials, and the environment. Finally, we’re going to showcase the work that’s going on here, the people involved in it, and the work going on in the institutions here in Chicago and Illinois.”

DRIVING ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ILLINOIS

Robert Wolcott
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

Dr. Wolcott, who said that his ancestors arrived in Illinois in 1812, and that he had arrived at Northwestern as a student in 1987, praised several previous speakers for taking a long view of what it means to be a university, a museum, a federal agency, a company, and the responsibilities these institutions have to society. He said he would examine the state of entrepreneurship in Illinois, and its place in both large and small companies.

On the basis of his own experience, he predicted strong opportunity for Illinois in entrepreneurship. “We’ll never be Silicon Valley, but it seems that everyone here finally understands that. We need to find our own way,” he said, but he cited encouraging signs that the Chicago region was gathering critical entrepreneurial abilities and building its own kind of innovation ecosystem.

He began by disputing the popular notion that only small companies were truly entrepreneurial. “We have a lot of big companies here,” he said, “and it is true that they don’t take the risks we would love them to. There is some support for the belief that big companies are not innovative enough. But I will propose to you that no small entrepreneur could bring a Boeing 787 Dreamliner to market.”

Big companies hold all the cards when it comes to commercializing a new product, he said. When new entrepreneurs start out, they have “absolutely nothing.” They might have brilliant technology, and they may have some friends who can help. But compared to Boeing, he said, or to Kraft, “they have

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

nothing.” He asked how many in the audience had been independent entrepreneurs, and the few who responded said they had been “lonely” and “scared” when they set out on their path. He thanked the respondents, and added that the path to entrepreneurship is “a fabulous path, but entrepreneurs can’t do everything alone.” It requires encouraging the local culture, an innovation ecosystem, mentors, and communities of people committed to entrepreneurial activity.

When one starts out as an entrepreneur, he said, or even thinks about the possibility, power comes from seeing other people nearby who have done the same thing and are interested in supporting you. In the earliest stages, he said, this support can be even more important than capital.

“When I first started out,” he said, “I was doing my PhD program in industrial engineering at Northwestern and I got into a start-up. We were able to raise a little over a million dollars, which we spent on a bunch of exciting stuff. We were getting some momentum when the technology economy collapsed in 2000. We even kept things moving until September 11, 2001. Then we knew it was over.”

He told of going to two parties just after the air went out of the dot.com balloon. The first one was in San Francisco, with friends from undergraduate days at Northwestern. He recalled people’s lively interest in what he was doing, questions about his experience, and eagerness to connect him with other entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who might be involved in similar technologies.

At the second party, in Chicago, he found the usual conversation about sports, real estate, and banking. When someone asked what he was doing, he said he was an entrepreneur. A questioner asked how big his company was, and when he said he had just started his company, and the times were difficult, the questions ceased and the conversation returned to real estate. “I knew what was in their minds: ‘He’s between jobs’.”

“I am pleased to say that this is starting to change in Chicago,” he continued, citing the importance of 1871, the public-private incubator space recently opened by state and industry sponsors. “Everybody has a presence in 1871,” he said. “It’s not just an incubator. The old incubator model was, give him a copier, he can share a copier. And let’s protect him from the antibodies of the world and hope that he’ll grow. Insulating a young chick from the dangerous environment is a good insight, but problems come when insulation becomes isolation. I’m seeing the development of an ecosystem now that is becoming more vital and connected. And 1871 is a great example.”

He turned to the importance of networks, which he considers vital for those who hope to become entrepreneurs. Students, in particular, need contact with experienced business people - colleagues who can give the new entrepreneur guidance, open doors, and lend credibility. “When you’re brand-new and no one has heard of you,” he said, “it’s hard to get a mentor, much less capital. Finding a mentor often happens by serendipity, but it begins with a network.”

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
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Another encouraging sign, he said, was that more potential entrepreneurs are choosing to stay in Chicago. The traditional route to entrepreneurial success, he said, was to leave and find support elsewhere. Today many people are working hard to create an environment where entrepreneurs can meet mentors, partners, and investors.

Finally, he said, change is emerging “at ground level where things actually happen.” He called this the notion of community. “This is different than an ecosystem, which is the world of attorneys, entrepreneurs, technologists, university, and government. It is the places where people actually connect with an affinity and a level of trust. When you’re new to things, you make mistakes. You need spaces where people feel comfortable to try an idea, to explore, to find their mission, and make things happen. I see an important role for larger communities, especially for universities and government, because they can act as convenors. A university is a neutral platform with spaces where people can come together. I think that is one of the most important missions we have, to help people connect with others in the community, find their mission, and then achieve it.”

He said that one important achievement of the Kellogg School of Management has been to create the Kellogg Innovation Network (<http://www.kinglobal.org>). The KIN, he said, was based on the desire to include more “real-world” perspective for the school. That is, while Kellogg researchers had long examined business functions from an academic vantage, this complementary model taps the expertise of people who actually run businesses. “We’re in the middle of research on this now,” he said. “We are seeing that successful innovation communities tend to be good at three things: education, so the people in the community improve their skills; economic development, which includes a reasonable fiscal and regulatory climate; and just as important, a supportive emotional climate where people can find that safe space, find their mission, and believe they can achieve it.”

He added that the number of such innovation communities has been increasing, with 1871 and the KIN as examples. Traditionally, universities hold study sessions on entrepreneurship and economic development, but they are only beginning to understand the need for convening the people who create ongoing community. “We’re starting to see this happen around the globe,” he concluded. “We are moving into a more complex and rewarding world with diverse innovation ecosystems, networks of mentors connected to those who are new, and the ability to envision in our state a community where people together can make innovation happen.”

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
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DISRUPTIVE ENVIRONMENTS
THAT SEED DISCOVERY AND PROMOTE TRANSLATION

Thomas O’Halloran
Chemistry of Life Processes Institute
Northwestern University

Dr. O’Halloran said that the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute, “a new type of entrepreneurial center,” was intended to “break down the silos that typically separate many classic academic disciplines.”37 This impulse is part of Northwestern’s “genetic code,” he said; that is, it was not “an emergency intervention,” but “something we did so well that we needed to take our game to the next level.” In particular, the goal was to “find ways to bring in new students as they’re learning chemistry or engineering, to have them see how to integrate these subjects by watching others do it, and to help them start companies by participating in team research.”

The institute promotes new types of discovery and helps translational advances, especially in the biomedical sector. “One of the first things I did as director,” he said, “was to bring in an entrepreneur-in-residence, Andrew Mazar, as a member of the faculty. The purpose was to have someone you can go to and say, I’ve got a result, I’ve got a patent: what do I do next? Making those connections are so critical in each stage of the rapid development of a company, whether the task is to apply for a SBIR, or even just to sit down and chat about how to start a company.”

He said that another critical element of the institute is that the director of operations, Sheila Judge, has a PhD in biochemistry and is able to work directly with faculty to put together team-based science grants and facilitate connections between areas as diverse as materials science, endocrinology, and synthetic chemistry. “All those people need each other,” he said, “but don’t necessarily speak the same language.”

Much of the impetus to build the institute, he said, came from former Provost Lawrence Dumas, who worked hard to encouraged interdisciplinary research and build a better environment for students to begin new types of companies. “The infrastructure and raw material of science and discovery are abundant across the Chicago region,” he said. “We have every kind of powerful tool and multiple sites of leading edge research, such as Argonne National Labs, multiple research hospitals, leading companies in drug development, and prominent research universities. In spite of those assets, we just haven’t seen enough companies starting here.” The Chemistry of Life Process is both an

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37According to the CLP’s website, “The Institute’s role in promoting scientific discovery is shaped by the fundamental recognition that established institutional boundaries must be transcended to produce transformative scientific advances. … the CLP fosters collaborative research at the interface of the chemical, physical, engineering, and life sciences. <http://www.clp.northwestern.edu/>.

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

institute, a common playground for many disciplines, and an effort to lower the hurdles in getting scientists to work across their chosen disciplines.

“We have lowered that barrier without creating a new department of interdisciplinary anything,” he continued. “We house a host of centers: it’s both a nanotechnology building, and a biology building; it fosters any type of interdisciplinary research involving molecules and cells.”

He described the building, which was occupied in 2009, as designed so that faculty from different disciplines work together on every floor. Their laboratories open into one another in an open design structure, and the environment itself is designed to optimize the “collisions” between programs. “In traditional science and engineering universities,” he said, “professors close the door and they crank out discipline-specific studies. in this institute the doors are open and there is more flux across boundaries.”

Leading scientists were recruited to the CLP to head efforts in proteomics, synthetic chemistry, molecular imaging, synthetic biology, materials science, and other overlapping specialties. “We are working at many levels to stimulate new types of partnerships and facilitate the recruitment of entrepreneurial faculty, particularly ones who have a talent at directing research teams to go where no one has gone before in experimental science.”

He described a joint grant proposal the CLP created when Dr. Lee’s program at the National Cancer Institute reached out to the physical sciences community, including mathematicians, modelers, and engineers, to invite a new perspective to the study of cancer. “This mechanism,” he said, “led by a clinician and myself, is bringing new types of thinkers into cancer research and educating the next generation of cancer researchers regardless of their parent discipline. We’ve built a collaborative network around the country, including Caltech, and with the Weizmann Institute in Israel. The grant mechanism supports pilot projects for new investigators in addition to 47 people already involved in the center.”

He mentioned two companies that have already emerged from CLP labs:

•   A biomedical engineer, Phil Messersmith, has founded a company based on the adhesive qualities of the byssal threads (or beard) used by mussels to cling to intertidal rocks or other substrate. Because of their strength and biodegradability, these threads are candidates for many applications.

•   Dr. O’Halloran started Viamet Pharmaceuticals with his colleague Holden Thorp, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It now has two Phase I compounds he hopes to use against prostate cancer and as an antifungal—both as an agricultural commodity, to protect crops, and also as a direct treatment for humans who have fungal infections.

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

Although Dr. O’Halloran and Dr. Messersmith attempted to interest venture capital firms in Chicago in both of these companies, the investors they found were in North Carolina and in Madison, Wisconsin, where the companies are now operating. He said that a variety of additional companies had also formed at the CLP, and new start-ups were in the process of formation.

He created one of these new start-ups with a former student in his laboratory, “which is exactly the kind of thing we were hoping to stimulate. This exposes the student to the research, lets him go out into the world, and then come back and work either here or elsewhere. This company has been sold and its product will be tested on patients in Europe in the fall.” Dr. Tom Meade, CLP member and founder of OhmX Corporation, provides another example of how this institute stimulates translation of basic science results into innovative new companies. OhmX is a bioelectronic detection company developing protein-specific monitoring devices to be used in the point-of-care (POC) setting. A CLP Board member led the investment team that ultimately funded OhmX up as an Evanston, IL based startup company.

THE BENCH TO BEDSIDE STORY OF ONCOFERTILITY

Teresa Woodruff
Northwestern University

Dr. Woodruff began with a description of the “epidemic of obesity and diabetes” which in Illinois has generated a “disproportionately unhealthy population.” She also said that “silent killers,” including infectious diseases, “put us on a par with many developing nations,” and that patients suffer an uneven distribution of care. At the same time, she said, “we have a tremendous potential to think through these problems and put in place heath care management programs for women and men living in our state.”

Beyond these better-known handicaps, she said, is a less familiar health problem that stems from significant differences in health factors and overall biology between the male and female sexes. “My work,” she said, “starts with the hypothesis that advances in medicine in the 21st century requires a fundamental knowledge of sex differences that exist at the molecular, cellular, and physiological levels.”

She said that certain gender disparities have been well known for years, including different kinds of presentation in atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. “This meant that for decades women disproportionately died from CV disease because diagnostic imaging didn’t see the kinds of small vessels that exist in women and don’t exist in men.” Again, in hip joint replacement, she said, most procedures in the United States have been done using the prototype of the male hip. This meant that women faced a disproportionate amount of pain and failure because the anatomy of those replacement parts was not correct for them.

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

“Historically,” she said, “the research community has assumed that beyond the reproductive act there aren’t many gender-based differences, but in fact there are, and they are relevant.” An example of relevance is the traditional barring of women from clinical studies. In part, this exclusion was driven by the possibility of pregnancy, which led to the wholesale exclusion of women until about 1993. At that point, Congress began to recognize the fact that the health of women was being jeopardized because they were not included in studies.

Many people argue that looking at gender differences for each disease would be too expensive, and that the menstrual cycle adds complexity and error to the data. In fact, she said, it would cost less to examine the gender differences early in clinical development than examining them later—when it was discovered that half the population does not respond to a particular drug, for example. She said that despite a mandate set in 2004 that principal investigators on NIH grants address the issue of inclusion, 64 percent of studies still do not report any outcome by sex. “So we’re still missing the boat on these indices. We also have a problem at the basic science level in that animal research is not reported by sex differences.”

To address these disparities, Dr. Woodruff and others started an initiative five years ago and developed a platform of activities, including education, advocacy, and seed funding for studies. She told the story of one surgeon who studies peripheral vascular disease (PVD). “I asked her how she could address PVD with both male and female animals, and she told me she didn’t study female animals. I convinced her to take one of our first seed grants to study the same drug that had clinical approval and was used every day in PVD. She soon came into my office and told me the drug was not effective on female animals, only on males. She went on to study it in humans, and found the same result—that the drug was effective for only half the population.” The objective of her initiative, she said, is to ensure that the next generation of women is not disproportionately disadvantaged because most of the clinical trials on treatment efficacy are done only on male animals.

Her group also started the Illinois Women’s Health Registry, a database of self-reported information on all women 18 years old and above. The goal of the registry, which now has more than 6,500 participants, is to include women in all studies, not just studies of women’s issues. Clinicians used to object that women would not take the time to appear for studies, she said, “but we’ve found that this is not the case. Women will volunteer for these studies.”

The basic conclusion, she said, was that “biological differences between men and women affect health, illness, and disease treatment across the life span. If we can understand those differences, we can improve the health of all people.”

Her group had also thought about the economics of this new view,” which is how Washington sees things. We’ve found that the study of sex-based biology is a cost-effective way to increase quality and reduce overall health-care cost.” If women were routinely included in the clinical trial of a drug, she said, researchers could determine early if the drug has adverse effects on women—

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
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rather than taking it all the way to approval with only male subjects and later discovering the effects on women. “As we move toward personalized medicine,” she said, “we have to cut the population at least in half in order to better tailor and understand our medicine.”

From a personal point of view, she said, “a lot of what women’s health is all about is having a baby and waiting until you get breast cancer. I grew up during the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and I can tell you that women’s health was all about breast disease.” And yet, she said, the common drug TPA (tissue plasminogen activator) was never tested on women. In one test in 1991, it was tested on 50,000 men and no women. “We have to get to a point where that does not happen.” To do this, she said, a major effort is to educate scientists and clinicians, try to catalogue all the evidence-based disparities, and calculate the losses in human health if it is not done correctly.

One particular area of importance, she said, is fertility management for young cancer patients who are still of child-bearing age. “There are more and more life-preserving treatments for cancer patients,” she said. “These include aggressive use of targeted radiation, broad chemotherapies, and extensive use of surgery. Each of these can be life-preserving, but can also harm fertility.”

Her current focus on oncology and fertility began in 2004, when the NIH supported a grant mechanism for Interdisciplinary Research Consortia intended to invite solutions for the most intractable problems. She was studying follicles in human ovaries at the time, trying to understand how the follicles and their tissues “make the decision to ovulate.” In other words, she said, she wanted to know what restrains most follicles during the years between puberty and menopause, and what stimulates the ovulation of a few follicles so that fertility is available every month.

“I was working on that question,” she recalled, “and working at a cancer center where I saw large numbers of young women who had been sterilized by cancer treatment.” She found that many of the cancer doctors and many of the patients were not focused on the question of fertility, especially for young women who were not married. “This did not compute for me,” she said. At the time, she said, fertility options for men were available,38 but young women with equal chance of survival had no options, and the physicians were not talking to the oncologists about this. “They were saying, that’s not us; that’s cancer.”

There were three gaps, she concluded: “an information gap, a data gap, and an options gap. So we created consortium to solve this problem using large teams. We also coined the term oncofertility, which happened on Christmas Eve with my family, because we agreed that those two words—oncology and fertility—belong together in one word, not separated even by a hyphen.” Thus was born the Oncofertility Consortium, based at Northwestern, which has the

____________________________

38She cited a booklet authored by Lance Armstrong on testicular cancer entitled “Families After Cancer: A Discussion with Cancer Survivors and Fertility Experts.”

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

motto “….exploring and expanding options for the reproductive future of cancer survivors.”

She described some of the activities run by the consortium, and some of the products developed over the last five years. “Five and six years ago,” she said, her voice choked by emotion, “no one was given these options. We’re making a difference. We have a national hotline. We’ve started a national physicians’ cooperative to help people and educate them. We’re actually making life better for men as well, because good health for anyone is good for the health of all of us.”

DISCUSSION

Dr. Mirkin applauded the progress made to date by the Oncofertility Consortium, and by other members of the panel, and asked the panelists for their opinions on what else could be done to “really move the needle with respect to innovation.”

Dr. Wolcott replied: “ecosystems, communities, and networks. There are lots of ways to do that, but if we build more of these collaborative systems, in addition to promoting interdisciplinary work and mobilizing capital, we’re going to see more commercialization over time.”

Dr. Mirkin rephrased his question, asking for what is missing in the current structure—“beyond those things that are constantly thrown out there. I would say, we have this great business school and we have this great technology operation, and it was a long time before there was interaction. That wasn’t because they didn’t like one another; they just did things differently, and there wasn’t a strong connection. It seems to me that a program that forces those relationships and interactions would be a significant advance.”

Dr. Wolcott said he agreed, but observed that in the last few years he had seen significant progress of this kind. He praised Dr. Ottino for taking a leading role, and said he was starting to see more active engagement between institutions. “When institutions are paying for conferences and interdisciplinary programs, it suggests that these programs are generating value.” He said that he and Dr. Michael Lippitz, his collaborator on the Innovation Communities research, had counted the formation of more than 35 new groups worldwide in the past few years. “So we’re seeing emergent models, and some are generating outcomes, such as commercialization and business deals.”

Dr. Ottino said he would like to propose “more convening” and “less comparing.” He said that he had been in Dallas recently, and “they showed me how proud they were of their architecture, as though they had more architecture than Chicago. He said that Chicago should stop comparing itself to the East, or the West. “I hear it in every talk,” he said. “It’s like we have a second-rate mentality. There is so much potential if we just bring together the elements we already have, that are loosely connected now, and avoid the comparisons. I would put a sign at the entrance of every conference saying that it is forbidden to make reference to any other part of the country.”

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

Dr. Woodruff offered “a practical suggestion,” triggered by her experience at NIH, when it was attempting to connect its own institutes. It ran an experimental program with different parts of the grant funded by NCI, NIH, and five other institutes. “Those kinds of links within NIH are harder than a link between Kellogg and McCormick,” she said. A problem was many scientific organizations pushed back against that mechanism, fearing that big science would take over from RO1-level science. In fact, she said, the program offered many types of grants, most of which were RO1s, and “the ordinary researchers connected in ways we wouldn’t have had otherwise. Eight research groups had tangible outcomes by working together. It was very broad, and allowed us to reach clinicians in practice. Our metric was not papers published, but lives changed. The outcomes tell the story. More of this kind of linked science is going to make a difference—not where you do it, but in ways that bring in clinicians or health economists or others. Still, five years afterward, we have strong metrics of success.”

Dr. O’Halloran agreed with the value of community—not to get rid of established disciplines, but to facilitate translation. He emphasized that this would require better coordination at the state level. He noted that state government in Texas would invest $10 million in a startup. “It could be transformative to have university-based gap funding, as well as state-based funding. Something we have to do in partnership with the business school is to build a culture that brings in a few venture firms.”

Dr. Wessner said that while the federal government is providing some funding for start-ups, in graduated stages, more has to come from the universities and the state. He asked about the role of foundations in Chicago, which had received little mention during the conference. In Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and other places, he said, foundations are important in filling gaps between state and federal programs. He also asked how successful the 1871 incubator had been.

Dr. Wolcott said that 1871 had opened only two months earlier and programs were already under way, with emphasis on community, capital, and startup companies, including those seeking start-up funding. “There’s no way to know whether it’s going to be successful, but given what I’ve seen, I feel good about it.”

Dr. Ottino said that entrepreneurship and interdisciplinary leadership now “have to be part of the discussion” for engineers, which was not true 10 years ago. “We need a critical mass of these people,” he said, “over the next two to three years.”

Dr. Wolcott cautioned against expecting universities to change too rapidly, given their long history and conservative traditions. When the first universities were founded in the Middle Ages, their primary purpose was to review the revealed knowledge of religious texts. They gradually began to add Greek and Roman culture, based primarily on the rediscovered works of Aristotle and others, adding the training of lawyers to their mission. Not until several hundred years later did they begin to create new knowledge, and only in

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

the 18th and 1th century did the pursuit of scientific knowledge truly displace the handed-down truths of theology in priority. After that, the mission of public service was added to teaching and research, but not until the past decade were universities expected to add yet another responsibility—that of commercializing the results of their own research.

“There are great challenges in doing this,” said Dr. Wolcott. “Because of the way markets work, it is not easy, and university people have not been trained to think this way. Nonetheless, it is the direction that universities worldwide are moving.”

Michael Kasen, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that despite the good collaboration of the chemistry and materials science departments in his studies on lithium-ion batteries, he “had no idea what is going on in the electrical engineering department that has to do with batteries.” He said that research on the control systems that moderate charging and other studies were relevant to his work. “I could be more proactive,” he said, “and go to more seminars. But for students it’s easy to get tunnel vision. The idea of getting from the fundamental work to something bigger, like commercialization, can be a challenge; most PhD students don’t usually get those experiences. Having programs with multiple departments and even universities would create more participation and a broader view. One way is to encourage conversations, maybe a gathering once a week for grad students and faculty, to get people talking.”

Dr. Ottino agreed that in his department he advises students in different disciplines and sends about 20 PhDs to a nine-day course where the topic is cross-linking. He proposed that because value is added through interdisciplinary work, universities would profit by hiring a full-time member to find and fund faculty who do the best interdisciplinary research. This broader structure, he added, must be accompanies by an adjustment of student funding to allow graduate students to shift their “laser focus” on one research topic to broader exposure to related topics.

Harry Gilman of Northwestern endorsed the idea of “once-a-week parties.” He also elaborated on the role of universities with respect to building innovation capacity. University endowments, he said, are invested in “intergenerational equity.” They invest not for the present but for the future. “They don’t see that some of the endowment ought to be invested in the raw materials for innovation, but they should, because that is the future. That would be a major policy change for a university, but it ought to be one of the criteria that the government uses to support research. That would make a massive difference in allowing the university to create raw materials for innovation and advancing them toward the marketplace. It’s a big change, but someone ought to start the ball rolling. NU could certainly do it because of its large endowment and the quality of its programs.”

A representative of Northern Illinois University proposed the idea that “the Midwest has a culture.” He made a distinction between the “primary culture” that had been discussed by many, including such institutions as

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
×

universities, centers, and incubators, and “secondary culture,” which are less formal, including weekly parties, the governor’s broadband initiative, coaching on how to get SBIR awards, and the rich environment of foundations that could further support innovation. The significance of the secondary culture, he said, was that it can help move an innovation culture faster than it might naturally move. “I saw this along the Route 128 belt 20 years ago,” he said, “where there was a lot of that secondary infrastructure building. I think direct attention should be paid to this.”

Dr. O’Halloran said that this was the third time foundations had been mentioned “at critical points.” There are already some templates in Chicago for foundation involvement, he said, such as the $50 million investment by the Searle Funds into the Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC) over a 10-year period. This organization has provided vital links between major Chicago-area research institutions, leveraged a number of major new team-science grant awards, provided common research assets, and stimulated a variety of scientific meetings and poster sessions. “This is a beginning, and will just scratch the surface of the Chicago philanthropic community. It’s time for that to happen.”

Dr. Testa closed the panel by suggesting that in place of a general call for funding, the innovation ecosystem could best benefit from a prioritized list of what needs to be done, along with the organizational changes required. This might include not only an agenda, but also ways to create new innovation communities, sub-communities, and “super-communities.” “Some of this is brick-by-brick work,” he said. “You couldn’t write a single check for this and have it be effective. Some clearly are shovel-ready projects that could be very productive in your university and Chicago region. But many require leadership, organization, and the communities that so many of us have discussed.”

Suggested Citation:"Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives." National Research Council. 2013. Building the Illinois Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14684.
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Responding to the challenges of fostering regional growth and employment in an increasingly competitive global economy, many U.S. states and regions have developed programs to attract and grow companies as well as attract the talent and resources necessary to develop innovation clusters. These state and regionally based initiatives have a broad range of goals and increasingly include significant resources, often with a sector focus and often in partnership with foundations and universities. These are being joined by recent initiatives to coordinate and concentrate investments from a variety of federal agencies that provide significant resources to develop regional centers of innovation, business incubators, and other strategies to encourage entrepreneurship and high-tech development.

Building the Illinois Innovation Economy is a study of selected state and regional programs to identify best practices with regard to their goals, structures, instruments, modes of operation, synergies across private and public programs, funding mechanisms and levels, and evaluation efforts. This report reviews selected state and regional efforts to capitalize on federal and state investments in areas of critical national needs. This review includes both efforts to strengthen existing industries as well as specific new technology focus areas such as nanotechnology, stem cells, and energy in order to improve our understanding of program goals, challenges, and accomplishments. As a part of this review, The Committee on Competing in the 21st Century: Best Practice in State and Regional Innovation Initiatives is convening a series of public workshops and symposia involving responsible local, state, and federal officials and other stakeholders. These meetings and symposia will enable an exchange of views, information, experience, and analysis to identify best practice in the range of programs and incentives adopted.

Building the Illinois Innovation Economy summarizes discussions at these symposia, fact-finding meetings, and commissioned analyses of existing state and regional programs and technology focus areas, the committee will subsequently produce a final report with findings and recommendations focused on lessons, issues, and opportunities for complementary U.S. policies created by these state and regional initiatives.

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