University of Iowa, like others, asks state for $2 million for tech transfer, bioscience

The University of Iowa will present $2 million in three project proposals next week for economic development and bioscience faculty recruitment.

According to an article in the Iowa City Press Citizen, one of UI's project proposals totaling $900,000, which would doube with mandated matching funds, is additional staff for tech transfer activities.

The other UI projects, totaling $1.1 million without matching funds, are to double the funding for recruiting bioscience faculty members and to help pay for the Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing and the university's technology innovation center.

In Wisconsin, the Biomedical Technology Alliance of Southeastern Wisconsin, an academic coalition for collaborative medical technology and biotech research, will receive $500,000 instead of $2.5 million, as Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle exercised a partial veto in signing the state budget bill Monday. The proposed $2.5 million would have consumed all of the funding available for technology commercialization grants, loans to start-up businesses as well as funding for four entrepreneurial and tech transfer centers that opened last fall around the state.

The online publication, Drug Researcher, discusses Pfizer's outsourcing of some of its technology jobs to India. The article concludes that the emergence of bioinformatics expertise in India is luring Pharma R&D activities on a piecemeal basis but "end-to-end proprietary drug discovery and development in India is unlikely to emerge for several more years."

ZDNet, the online IT publication, looks at companies that acquire patents from other companies and then seeks revenues by enforcing them, focusing on Acacia Research, a California-based firm best known for its V chip for television but also the parent company of CombiMatrix, a molecular biology tools developer.

The article delves into the changing patent regime and is a worthwhile primer on today's patent market, if not the final word on a space that is likely to change even more and require more collaboration. Remember that there are on the order of 100 patents involved in the making of a desktop computer – if there wasn't a way to create order out of this, innovation would surely come to a halt.

Today's Forbes.com takes a look at the contract research organization market, the firms who are increasing their share of work performed for Pharma. Based on information provided by David Windley, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. in Nashville, the article identifies Covance, Charles River Laboratories, and SFBC International, and ICON as the top pharmaceutical industry outsourcers.

Satish Amarnath, a microbiologist working with Manipal Hospital in Bangalore,
writing in India's Express Healthcare Management magazine, takes a look at clinical laboratory development in the context of healthcare and the need for the human touch.

The next century may see patients being monitored from home, where sensors placed in their body measure blood sugar and transmit through the intranet to the hospital. This could be evaluated by expert systems and would react even before we have said Jack Robinson and injected or stopped release of insulin from a repository in the body.

So, will doctors become redundant?

I would still say that the realm of the doctor providing a healing touch and a soothing influence will never be irrelevant as seen in patients counseled for HIV, where patients fight the deadly virus infections by a few tests, a little medicine and a lot of advice and moral support.

Amarnath has been blind since he was attacked by someone who threw sulphuric acid on his face in 1998. He continues to do his work and, in a profile published in Eyeway magazine this spring, he explains how he performs his work in microbiology despite his impaired sight.

In microbiology, a lot is based on sight, on seeing things and reporting what is there. Yes, I can’t do that now but what I do is this: I ask two people to describe it to me and then I draw my conclusions.