From lab to ledgers: the N.C. Biotechnology Center melds the state's best scientific, technical and business minds into Centers of Innovation.

• Position: BIOTECHNOLOGY ROUND TABLE

To speed products from lab to market, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center is working to align research and industry in what it-calls Centers of Innovation. Funded by state grants, COIs target economic sectors that benefit from biotechnology. Their goal: to attract and create companies, business partnerships and jobs, plus increase federal and corporate funding for university research. Leaders of the Biotechnology Center and three of its COIs recently discussed the two-year-old programs impact--present and potential--on economic development. Participating were Norris Tolson, president and CEO of the Research Triangle Park-based Biotechnology Center; Kenneth Tindall, its senior vice president of science and business development; Mary Beth Thomas, vice president in charge of the COI program; Cindy Clark, president of the COI for advanced medical technology; Greg Davis, CEO of Durham-based By ton Medical Inc. and chairman of the. COI for advanced medical technology; Brooks Adams, executive director and president of the COI for nanobiotechnology; Michael Batalia, director of the Office of Technology Asset Management at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem and chairman of the COI for nanobiotechnology; Rick Williams, chief business officer of RTP-based Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences and original principal investigator and fiscal agent for the COI for drug discovery; and John Didsbury, acting director of the COI for drug discovery. BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA Publisher Ben Kinney moderated the discussion, which was sponsored by the Biotechnology Center and held at its headquarters. Following is a transcript, edited for brevity and clarity.

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How did COIs get started?

Tindall: The Biotechnology Center, which has been around for 25 years, has had a number of programs working with universities to help technology development with grants. We don't do grants for basic research. We want to see some sort of commercial product at the end. We put money into education and training--K-12 education and workforce training in the area of biotechnology. We have a loan program in which we put money into young companies. The Centers of Innovation took advantage of the concept of open innovation.

What's its application to COIs?

Tindall: By focusing on places where we have strengths--advanced medical technologies, nanobio and drug discovery--we see the strengths of science and technology development not in any one professor's lab or in any one department but across the state and beyond. To be able to partner with industry in a way that helps them solve problems allows for the creation of products and...