Seeds of Change UMass Is a National Leader in Health and Science Research

It’s estimated that by age 30, half of all sexually active women have been infected by chlamydia. And though screenings are encouraged and antibiotics are available to treat the disease, no vaccine as yet exists.

Researchers at UMass Amherst hope to change that, however. Last year, Maryland-based BioVeris Corp. entered into a research agreement with the UMass Carbohydrate-based Vaccine Group (CBV), under which the company is sponsoring up to $600,000 of research aimed at developing a chlamydia vaccine.

“Ultimately, our mission is to do research for the public good and give it back to the public,” said Marla Michel, director of Research Liaison and Development at UMass, which works with faculty researchers to develop partnerships with industry and bring products to market. The department is a critical element on a campus that recorded more than $112 million in sponsored research activity last year alone.

In fact, CBV is just one of some 70 “research centers” on campus, which manage more than 200 research cases at any one time, placing UMass firmly among the top 50 research institutions in the U.S. And with that much work going on, someone needs to provide a little direction.

“We’re a service organization that supports the faculty in their endeavors,” Michel said of her department’s role. “We do it by helping them think about how they can build their research projects into programs, and understand what sectors of the business community are right for them, and we advise them on how their programs might interact with industry.”

UMass officials like to refer to the mantra “from bench to bedside” to illustrate that no research should be conducted in a vacuum, and they hope the on-campus work will lead to public benefits.

“I’ve heard countless times, when I talk to different people, ‘I didn’t know you did that there,’” Michel said. “In some circles, we’re better known outside of UMass than we are here; in fact, we have international recognition. We’re just trying to tell a story and package it in a way that people can understand it. There’s a lot of excellence here on campus.”

Building a Team

UMass clearly gives research a high priority when hiring professors, said John Cunningham, dean of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, one of the top two research departments at the university.

”Most of our faculty, when they’re recruited, have a long-time interest in research,” he said. “We bring in people with an area of expertise that’s already well-established, and they tell us what areas they want to explore.”

Not surprisingly, he noted, those areas tend to overlap significantly with the interests and priorities of top funding agencies, including the federal government.

“They tend to be large-scale problems of health or science, requiring teams of investigators from our campus, and often collaborations across institutions,” Cunningham told The Healthcare News. “These collaborations can be regional, national, or international, but they are people who can match the expertise needed to find an answer to a major question and compete for the funding.”

Yet, expertise is only one part of the equation in an intensely competitive environment for available grants. Public and private funding sources also want to see a solid infrastructure in place. Michel used the Cellular Engineering research center as an example of how to take varied research efforts and provide the framework necessary to compete for funds.

“How do you marry the life sciences with engineering to bring solutions externally?” she said. “It might involve stem cell engineering. Or it might involve protein folding and how proteins work to create new diagnostics and treatments. Then there’s tissue engineering; there might be some opportunities for re-engineering tissues to take to your bones better.”

Research Liaison and Development basically considers all these separate programs and develops a synergy between them, providing structure and strengthening the collective pitch to industry, private foundations, and the federal government to obtain funding.

Nanotechnology is another good example, she said. Since 1997, scientists affiliated with UMass have been awarded more than $30 million in nanotech funding from sources including the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, and the National Institutes of Health.

“They’re looking at how you manufacture things at the nanoscale, below 100 nanometers,” she said. (To illustrate, there are 1 million nanometers in a millimeter, and one nanometer is the length of about 10 atoms in a row.) “Clearly, nanotechnology has implications not only for semiconductors and chips, but also in biology.”

With multiple nanotech efforts going on around campus, the university coalesced them into MassNanoTech, a campus-wide institute for nanoscale science and engineering. That caught the eye of the National Science Foundation, which awarded the institute a five-year, $3.1 million grant to train young scientists in making nanodevices.

“We pulled together 50 researchers who were doing nanotechnology,” Michel said. “The organizational framework is important in getting grants and funding. It comes down to how you tell the story.”

The institutes are often like entrepreneurial efforts in the way they’re launched and developed, she added. Take the Food Technology group, which is coming up with compounds that might be used to develop more nutritional food products. It began as just a few faculty members doing independent work.

“We help provide the structure to show them how to go from project to program,” Michel said. “Once they expand it, it’s like becoming a small business.”

High Stakes

The comparison to the business world is apt, considering that there are high financial stakes involved. UMass and BioVeris reached a licensing agreement giving the company exclusive licensing rights to commercialize any chlamydia vaccine developed at UMass. BioVeris will pay a $75,000 license issue fee, and also costs involved in clinical trials, regulatory approvals, and patent costs, and royalties on product sales.

The upside for BioVeris? Industry analysts estimate the market for worldwide sales of a chlamydia vaccine to be in the area of $1 billion annually.

Of course, the human benefits of much of the UMass research far outweigh the financial considerations. For example, the institution was recently named the lead research center in a global effort to develop tools needed to create vaccines and tests for infectious animal diseases that threaten agriculture and the food supply.

Officials at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) hope the project, led by UMass veterinary immunologist Cynthia Baldwin, accelerates the diagnosis and treatment of a range of ailments such as mad cow disease and avian influenza. While those are high-profile problems, lesser-known ills that commonly affect poultry and fish cost the U.S. economy millions of dollars per year.

A critical step in treating and preventing the spread of infectious diseases is to identify the immunological reagents — compounds and molecules such as antibodies — that organisms use to fight disease.

“Cells have a multitude of molecules for fighting infectious diseases, and these are relatively well-understood in mice and humans, but that isn’t the case for many other animal species,” Baldwin said. “Yet these reagents are necessary tools for understanding a disease’s pathology and developing treatment or prevention strategies.”

The researchers intend to develop 20 reagents per species group. Many of the reagents developed will be stored in cell banks in the U.S. and Europe and marketed by commercial vendors, making them publicly accessible to as many researchers as possible.

“The fruits of this work,” Baldwin said, “will not only benefit a large group of researchers such as veterinary immunologists, pathologists and microbiologists, but will help protect the food supply and the public by improving our capabilities to control and prevent the spread of infectious disease.”

“We’re collaborating with partners across the country and around the world on this,” said Paul Kostecki, vice provost for Research at UMass. “It’s a great example of the kind of world-class stuff that’s going on here.”

A Reputation to Protect

With many grants surpassing the million-dollar mark these days, Cunningham said it’s more crucial than ever to have the right network in place to compete. Plenty of the foundations are private, but much of the work emerges from federal priorities — in effect, outsourcing government research to university-based scientists.

“You need an infrastructure in place because a single researcher can’t assemble all the required documents, clearances, assurances of safety, and compliance with regulations,” he said. And the stronger the faculty talent pool at a university, the more likely it is that prestigious projects will come its way — which in turn leads to more promising students, which also raises the profile of an institution.

“If you want to recruit in the big leagues, potential faculty members are looking at how much you’re investing in prestigious research,” he said. “And by bringing in more than $100 million in funding every year, we’re getting into the big leagues. Out-of-state students are looking for a university with a name and a reputation.”

When it comes to scientific research, UMass is certainly developing a strong reputation — and might be changing lives around the world in the process.