Farther down the East Coast, Maryland’s biotech community is taking a wait-and-see attitude after the breakup of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI). The University System of Maryland’s Board of Regents is dismantling UMBI as a single institute after an ad hoc committee investigating the Institute’s effectiveness found no strong scientific or organizational justification to keep it intact. “I’m sure it was a very thoughtful decision on the part of the regents,” says Richard A. Zakour, executive director of MdBio, the bioscience division of the Tech Council of Maryland. However, “it’s hard to say how it’s going to work out,” he adds. UMBI, established in 1985, is the only University System of Maryland institution with a legislative mandate to drive economic development, according to its annual report. Its research areas include biotechnology applications to human health, marine environments, agriculture, and protein engineering-structural biology, with a focus on tech transfer and commercialization efforts. UMBI encompasses four centers and operates a fifth across three campuses. The Institute has an operating budget of $63.7 million, with 85 faculty members and 59 graduate students involved in its operations.

In its report, the panel studying UMBI said its organization “as a geographically dispersed, freestanding entity has created intractable problems. As a result, while UMBI has attracted talented researchers and developed impressive, state-of-the art laboratory facilities, it has not produced the level of translational research and technology transfer for which it was created.” The committee cited lack of scale in UMBI programs, isolation among UMBI’s research centers and between the centers and the university system’s other research institutions, and absence of a critical mass of graduate and undergraduate students. The regents approved the committee’s recommendation to align UMBI’s research centers with their respective university campuses. Jennie Hunter-Cevera, who served as UMBI’s president for almost a decade, had previously announced her resignation and left at the end of June to join a research institute in North Carolina. An acting successor will be named to guide the Institute’s reorganization, according to a spokeswoman for the university system. William M. Gust, managing general partner at venture capital firm Anthem Managing Partners in Baltimore and a member of UMBI’s board of visitors, says the regents have done a good job with the reorganization. Whether UMBI has been a good investment for the state’s taxpayers “is in the eye of the beholder,” he adds. The money pumped into UMBI over the years has resulted in just one start-up company, but he cites a much better track record in terms of patents and licenses.

Go to: Gazette.net

Posted July 1st, 2009 under Tech Transfer

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