Bio project chasing dollars
BYLINE: Stephen Pounds, The Palm Beach Post, Fla.
Nov. 15--Project Checkmate, the IBM and Scripps Florida project designed to arrest the spread of a pandemic flu virus, is making another run at incentive dollars.
The partnership has submitted its proposal for $9 million in economic development money from Palm Beach County and hopes to take it before the county commission in December for financing sometime in the first quarter, said Deborah Mosca, Scripps project manager.
"We're making a push at the county because that's where we want to be, and then build around it," Mosca said.
Mosca and her IBM counterpart, Pete Martinez, were in Gainesville on Tuesday for the first day of the BioFlorida conference. The state's biotechnology trade group holds the annual meeting to update executives, scientists and venture capitalists about life-science advances around the state during the past year.
About 400 people are expected to participate in the two-day conference. Gov. Jeb Bush will speak to the group today.
Karin Eastham, chief operating officer of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, was a keynote speaker on the conference's first day. She gave participants an update on what the La Jolla, Calif.-based research center was planning for its new laboratory in Orlando.
Eastham said Burnham -- which had considered setting up shop in Port St. Lucie -- hopes to be operational in a 175,000-square-foot lab on a 50-acre site at Lake Nona by early 2009. Its budget is expected to reach $90 million a year.
"There's so much interest from public and private capital. People are willing to invest," Eastham said. "The public gets it, and that's why the governor has been about to bring together (financial) packages to bring institutions to Florida."
But before Burnham can break ground, it needs to negotiate 22 agreements involving financing, land, temporary housing and others, and only one has been signed so far, she said.
Joanna Davies, a scientist at the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, also gave a keynote speech on the organization's synthetic chemistry research, which is aimed at treating multiple sclerosis and diabetes. La Jolla-based Torrey Pines announced plans in September to build a laboratory in Port St. Lucie's Tradition development.
When IBM and Scripps initially submitted the Project Checkmate proposal over the summer, they had hoped to dip into a $200 million Innovation Incentive Fund that Bush pushed through the last session of the legislature in order to boost biotech business in Florida.
Then came three major research centers, including Torrey Pines. They drained the fund that Project Checkmate had hoped to tap.
At the same time, state and federal officials asked to see scientific support for the idea that a model could be devised to show how a virus could spread in a pandemic.
That sent Martinez and project scientists to Washington, D.C., to meet with key officials of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health and the White House.
"We were asked by the state and the feds to provide scientific confirmation," Martinez said. "What we were told is that nobody else is working on this. And they would know."
Originally, the proposal called for the state to match the county's contribution. Now IBM and Scripps are meeting with the state to decide how much they should ask for and where it might come from.
County and state officials could not be reached for comment Monday.
Martinez said he also plans to meet with Gov.-elect Charlie Crist and Sen. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, the next Senate president, about replenishing incentives for biotech. Both have said they support additional backing but haven't said what form that might take or how much it might be.
On the federal side, dollars are still stretched thin for biotech research, so the partners are expected to ask for a modest sum initially, about $25 million, and aren't expected to hear whether they'll receive any grant money until later next year.
The entire project is expected to cost $544 million.
If the two are successful, 2007 will serve as the project's proof-of-concept year, giving IBM and Scripps ammunition to ask for backing to build a supercomputer in Boca in 2008.
As it is, hardware will be housed at IBM's offices. But Florida Atlantic University also has offered to house the computational center on its Boca campus.
"There's a reality that we can't do the computational side -- the prediction side -- without the supercomputer," Mosca said.
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