Biomaterials Institute hopes to speed new technology topatients

CNY Business Journal (1996+), Feb 8, 2008 by Tampone, Kevin

SYRACUSE - No one can do it alone.

No researchers that is. Especially if those researchers are working on materials that go into the human body to patch up a balky knee or repair a hole in a heart.

Biologists, engineers, chemists, and physicists they all must work together if they're going to produce something that can actually help patients, says Patrick T. Mather, director of the new Syracuse Biomaterials Institute at Syracuse University (SU).

"We all need each other to achieve our goals," says Mather, who has been working on the institute since it launched last fall. "And the integration of all those approaches has not normally happened at the university. It's usually happened much further down the stream at the corporate level."

Mather, along with the 20 other faculty members involved in the institute, hopes to change that. About 25 graduate students and 10 to 15 undergraduates are involved as well.

The institute's more than $1 million a year in funding comes from a combination of federal, industrial, state, and private sources, along with SU.

By 2009, the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute will have its first centralized home in a two-floor, 20,000-square-foot lab, office, and administration suite in Bowne Hall on the SU campus.

At the moment, however, Mather is concentrating on one of the biggest challenges to the institute's success: coordination.

Ensuring that faculty working in different areas all know each other and know each other's research is no small task, Mather says, especially when such collaboration is not always the norm.

"We want to have a coherent effort so that what I'm doing and what [someone] over in chemistry is doing are connected," says Mather, who is also the first Milton and Ann Stevenson Professor of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering. "At least we're knowledgeable of what each other is doing and when possible, we join up and put our patents together."

Starting that collaboration early in the research process will ultimately lead to products that are closer to commercialization.

And since the ultimate goal of the institute is to get new medical technologies to patients, companies will be a big part of the plan.

Eventually, Mather wants to recruit about 20 companies as affiliates of the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute. They could be firms that don't have their own corporate research capabilities or businesses that haven't traditionally done materials-science work.

As the institute's faculty members progress in their research, they could license intellecutual property directly to companies or spin off their own business if the technology is too new or risky for an established firm.

Mather envisions a two-way flow between the institute's researchers and companies. Current faculty members have expertise in materials for the heart, cardiovascular system, and orthopedic applications.

New technologies will naturally arise from that expertise, but Mather hopes companies will also come to the institute with their own problems and ideas.

Prior to the launch of the formal institute, a group of SU professors had already been working to improve collaboration and enhance the university's position in biomedical engineering, and later biomaterials.

Jeremy Gilbert, associate dean for research and doctoral programs in SU's College of Engineering and Computer Science, first pitched the idea for the Biomaterials Institute to the university administration.

"The nation is number one in the world in terms of innovation for medical devices," he says. `Biomaterials are a central part of that innovation.

"For us to focus on materials used for medical devices used in the human body would provide opportunities for funding and to link to current device companies and to spin off new companies."

Gilbert himself, along with anotherprofessor, Julie Hasenwinkel, are founding a company based around a new type of bone cement. Gilbert and Hasenwinkel are both also faculty members of the Biomaterials Institute.

The main advantage of the institute is the knowledge it will help spread among researchers, Gilbert says.

"There's lots of problems you deal with in medical devices," he says. "There's so many facets to the problems that no one discipline can deal with. The problems related to medical devices are fundamentally multidisciplinary problems."

In addition to increasing familiarity among faculty members, Mather wants students involved in the institute's research to know each other. That will foster even more connections, he says.

The institute recently established six graduate fellowships in biomaterials and is even exploring the idea of starting a doctoral program in biomaterials, which Mather says would be the first in the nation.

Of course, Mather adds, none of the institute's goals would be possible if faculty and students didn't actually want to work together.

"There's very little ego here," he says. "There's not a whole lot of 'Well, who invited you to my party?' It's not always that way at some universities."