Phoenix's Pied Piper? Trust Sets Aside $50M to Attract Personalized Medicine Talent

The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based charitable organization created to disburse funds left by philanthropist Virginia G. Piper, the wife of the founder of Motorola, Paul Galvin, has committed $50 million to attract 10 leading researchers in the field of “personalized medicine” to the Phoenix area.

The Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust's Initiative in Personalized Medical Science and Technology will “enable recognized research institutions in Maricopa County to attract 10 Piper Chairs -- leading scientists, engineers and clinicians in the fields of bioscience, nanotechnology and advanced information technology who are working to advance personalized medicine,” the foundation said in a statement.

Over the next five years, the trust will provide up to 10 $5 million grants -- each with $4 million earmarked for enhanced research; $500,000 for research by undergraduate and graduate students; and $500,000 no-strings Piper Prize in Personalized Medicine given to a leading researcher, much like the MacArthur “Genius Grants.”

The eligible area institutions -- universities, research institutes and hospitals -- successfully recruiting “Piper Chairs” will be required to ante up salaries and laboratory facilities.

Personalized medicine is a powerful concept that says medicine will, one day somewhere in the future, be tailored according to an individual's genetic profile. But, in reality, this is very much a visionary quest given that today's science doesn't even begin to have the information and knowledge needed to do this. It's biology's grand challenge and one that is being enabled by the technical and scientific breakthroughs in the new biology economy.

Phoenix is very much the biomedical hotbed, on a par with Seattle and other cities in the US following the bio leaders – Boston, San Diego, Maryland, and the Research Triangle. In 2000, the state's citizens approved a sales tax increase that provided some $44 million a year for research in the state public universities and downtown Phoenix has sprouted a core of biomedical research institutions, anchored by the Translational Genomics Research Institute and headed by Jeffrey Trent, who was the scientific director of the Human Genome Project.

Certainly, funding can be a powerful magnet for scientific talent. Who will take the bait?