Research Utah.

• Position: Panel Discussion

FOR our first annual "Research Utah" roundtable, we gathered an exceptional group of Utah researchers, scientists, inventors and tech businesspeople to talk about the state of the state's innovation in terms of factors including funding, recognition and invention-to-commercialization.

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Participants included Balky Nair, technical program manager at Ceramatec; Chris Johnson, director of the University of Utah School of Computing and the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute; Barbara Graves, academic chair of the Oncological Sciences laboratory science department at Huntsman Cancer Institute; Brian Moss, president of the Utah Life Science Association, the trade association that represents the state's biotechnical, biomedical and medical device industry; Gary Crocker, president of Crocker Ventures, a local life sciences early-stage venture fund; Marie Walsh, a professor at Utah State University in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences; Daniel Simmons, director of the Brigham Young University Cancer Research Center; Steve Kubisen, Director of Technology Transfer Operations for USU; Rep. Peggy Wallace, a major proponent of HB 240, the state "Fund of funds"; David Endicott, director of technology programs for Alliant Techsystems (ATK) at Promontory; Stephen Prescott, executive director of the Huntsman Cancer Institute and a professor at the U of U; Suzanne Winters, special assistant for technology import at Battelle Memorial Institute; Brent Miller, vice president for research at USU; Lynn Astle, director of technology transfer at BYU; Glenn Prestwich, CSO at Echelon Biosciences; and Ray Gesteland, VP for research at the U of U.

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Special thanks to Michael Keene, State Science Advisor, for leading our discussion.

If we were to do a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) for the state of Utah, where are the sustainable competitive advantages in the science and technology arena?

JOHNSON: I will get us going and pick my personal favorites. They leverage off the idea of the so-called economic ecosystems. My opinion about where some of those are is, not surprisingly, the computing side of things, together with the genetics and medical sciences we have here. One project we are working on right now includes a team of computer scientists, working with Mario Capecchi, one of our famed geneticists here at the University of Utah, as well as some people working on the clinical side of genotype to phenotype work.

They have been spending a lot of time over the last years understanding the genetic makeup and interplay between genes. One of the things that Mario is very interested in now is looking at the morphology of these changes in mice. There is a large imaging and visualization component of this work in looking at the changes, morphologically, when you do a gene mutation and compare that to normal. This has a lot of applications in the medical sciences and the clinical sciences as well.

The intersection of medical computation and medical genetics is a good example of where we have a particularly long suit, and GenData, which is an example of an attempt to capitalize on that. Within the field of computer sciences alone, is visualization one of our greatest strengths?

JOHNSON: Certainly, in computer graphics and visualization. We tend to distinguish computer graphics as being more for the entertainment business, geometric design, et cetera, and scientific visualization as being more for science, engineering, medical application; but we have strengths and history in both of those. U.S. News and World Report puts us in the top five nationally for computer graphics, and I would say we are in the top three internationally in visualization. We've won four of the last six best paper awards for the International Conference for Visualization. We have one of the best groups in the world here, and we should take advantage of that.

Most people don't know this, which is one of my biggest frustrations in being the director of the school here. We bring in people from all over the world for the Evans & Sutherland distinguished lecture series--Turing Award winners and famous scientists. When we show them the research we are doing here, to a person they say, 'Wow, I didn't know what great research is going on at Utah.' I don't think most people know about the history in computer graphics that we have here and the companies, like Pixar and Adobe and Silicon Graphics and Netscape, spawned by our graduates from Utah. We need to do a better job in getting the word out.

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We have a good spectrum of people here representing the life sciences. I wondered if I could ask you to speak out in turn about how you see our situation in that industry here in the state.

SIMMONS: I don't know what it would take to get a [pharmaceutical] nucleus started here in Utah from a business side. I work extensively with Merck, and have worked with almost all the major pharmaceutical companies. I know that expansion within Merck right now--if you look at the sites that they are building they are in major research areas. What would attract them to Utah? It would have to be the emerging genetics, pharmacogenetics area.

CROCKER: I would agree that it may be unlikely in the short-term that you are going to see a mass transfer of manufacturing operations or corporate headquarters to Salt Lake. On the other hand, you have an unusually potent combination of pharmacogenetics leveraging off the Utah population database. You have an existing clinical body of expertise here that is one of the strengths of this community and is underappreciated, also. The clinical research community here is extremely well organized and experienced. If we can combine those two, I think there's a...