McLendon discusses BRC future at town hall
Provost: progress on negotiations to create unique think tank

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Rice is negotiating with more than a dozen potential partners to create a unique think tank for translational life sciences research at the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC).

Provost George McLendon discussed the plans with about 100 people at a town hall meeting Jan. 20 in the BRC auditorium.

“In essence, this would be a partnership between private industry, academia and the state of Texas,” McLendon said. “There’s really nothing quite like this at any of the other life science business accelerators around the country.”

The BRC is an innovative space where scientists and educators from Rice and other institutions in the Texas Medical Center (TMC) work together to perform leading research that benefits human medicine and health. With a total of 477,000 gross square feet of laboratory, classroom and meeting space, the 10-story building at the corner of University Boulevard and Main Street also represents one the largest capital investments in Rice’s history.

McLendon, who joined Rice in July, said a series of events, including the international financial crisis and a building boom for research space within the TMC, warranted a revisiting of Rice’s strategic plan for the BRC.

“We had imagined that we would be a unique magnet for research space, but as it turns out, other high-quality research space is available,” McLendon said. “That doesn’t detract from the original promise of the BRC. It just means that we need to think a bit more. We need to ask, ‘What are some of the missing ingredients for the Texas Medical Center community that Rice might be able to help with?'”

McLendon said Rice has a unique opportunity to build a “translational think tank” that provides the full array of expertise and services required to translate ideas from the lab into a clinical setting where they benefit patients.

He said Rice’s negotiations are focused on bringing together three key elements for the think tank: a leading venture capital group that focuses exclusively on early stage life science opportunities, a top-flight clinical research organization that can guide the development of medical products from conception through FDA approval, and a cadre of proven business leaders who can mentor and oversee the commercialization of life-science startups.

Preliminary plans call for the think tank to occupy the 10th floor of the BRC and for TMC partners to occupy laboratory space on other floors. McLendon said he could not name specific firms or organizations until negotiations are final, but he noted the university has verbal commitments from enough think-tank participants to generate significant interest among TMC partners.

McLendon laid out a vision for what might happen in the BRC using the example of a tissue engineering researcher who was interested in creating a new type of heart valve that could save the lives of cardiac patients.

“Ideally, you would have these bioengineers next to the surgeons who are thinking about how to get this into a patient, and they would be in a continuing dialogue with people who’d be saying, ‘Here’s the kind of trial design you’re going to have to use to get approval for that. Here’s the kind of resource base that it’s going to take to make that work. Here’s how you can raise the money to do that, and here’s someone who can oversee the whole process because they understand the commercialization pipeline.’

“That’s not a theoretical example,” he said. “We’re pretty sure we can take some of our tissue engineers and put them immediately next to some of the leading cardiac surgeons in the world and their foundational research teams. There would be nothing else like that outside this building.”

The plan is to lease half floors throughout the BRC to TMC partners. McLendon said Rice intends to save “some key synthetic space” in the BRC for expansion of the university’s own departments.

“Some of the cream of the TMC research community” want to be in the BRC, McLendon said. With all these intellectual resources in one building, he said, he expects the BRC to be “a fun place to hang out” for faculty and students.

“And it has the best parking in the TMC by far,” he said.