BIOTECH GAMBLE; Scientists say Florida's half-billion-dollar research investment is poised to pay off
BYLINE: By CATHY ZOLLO H-T SCIENCE WRITER
DATELINE: JUPITER
It doesn't look like much now: five wooden trailers and some lab space at Florida Atlantic University, but Scripps Florida should one day be a biomedical powerhouse -- an economic engine for the state, a medical hope for millions.
Plagued with delays, its permanent home won't be finished for years, but the real work at Scripps, from basic research to drug discovery, began with the first scientists hired in 2004.
Today, 200 researchers and support staff await completion of a 350,000-square-foot, postmodern lab complex that will open at the end of 2008.
Even with the delays, excitement over the research that will happen there -- that is happening now in more modest quarters -- is palpable.
Scripps is a new kind of animal in biomedical research, one nested in the creative atmosphere of a university but armed with the tools that, until now, were possessed mainly by major pharmaceutical companies.
Scientists here search for medical breakthroughs, teach college classes and work with instruments like a $10 million robot designed to halve the time it takes to find new drugs. One of only five such machines in use in the nation, it gets the respect due an emperor and treatment just as deferential.
Backed by more than a half-billion dollars in incentives from Florida governments, the Scripps center hopes to find medicines and treatments for rare diseases that major drug companies haven't targeted.
The center also is projected to become an engine for the state's economy, attracting scores of private companies that want to work alongside and take advantage of Scripps scientists and facilities.
Founded in 1924 by philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps, the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is one of the world's largest, private, nonprofit biomedical research companies.
Florida's $510 million bid to win a sister operation began with a 2003 meeting between Gov. Jeb Bush and Scripps President Richard Lerner, but it wasn't a done deal until January.
The state's $310 million share of the incentive package is the biggest the state has ever offered a private company. The $200 million Palm Beach County kicked in came as 100 acres on FAU's campus and cash.
The investment aims to grow a bioscience industry in a state better known for its oranges. It is a gamble on the hope that other firms will follow Scripps and spread high-wage jobs throughout Florida.
The state is home to between 50 and 85 private and public bioscience companies, which ranks it 10th in the nation, according to a report by Ernst & Young.
Harry Orf, science operations chief at Scripps Florida, is optimistic that there is still time for Florida to get a respectable share of the coming bioscience boom.
"It can't be saturated in every city and every state," he says. "But there is plenty of room."
More than jobs
Scripps and operations like it could change the economic face of Florida, Orf says, but it is the science they do that will astonish.
Cell phones, medical imaging, fast computers and trustworthy navigation are a sliver of the change physics brought to modern life.
But look down the road a few decades, said Orf, who was recruited from Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was director of molecular biology. "Bioscience will have that kind of effect."
Bioscience is the use of biological processes to solve problems and create useful products.
It can be as simple as using mold to make penicillin. In its medical applications today, bioscience combines high-tech instruments and what we know about genetics to find new drugs and treatments.
It is the stuff of science fiction -- medical research that will soon lead to therapies and drug prescriptions based on a person's genetic makeup and drugs for rare diseases, ones that afflict fewer than 20,000 people.
Orf and other top researchers were drawn to the Institute by that potential -- and all the complex, high-dollar equipment at their disposal.
Especially the robot.
Jutting from the center of a glass cubicle, its chunky yellow arm looks like it belongs on an assembly line, but what this $10 million appendage puts together will cut in half the time it takes to find new drugs.
The robot arm sits center stage in one of the larger labs Scripps is using at FAU.
Around it are the cases that hold stacks of microtiter plates, each about the size of a man's hand and waffled with 1,536 tiny wells.
These are test tubes that each hold a disease cell or protein against which a single operator can try a million compounds a day, running at top speed.
The diseased cells are designed to glow if they change in response to one of those compounds, potentially singling out that compound for further testing.
A breast cancer cell might light up when hit with a chemical that sea sponges make, and researchers would then give chase.
How does it change the cell? What other effects does it produce? Could it be a treatment or even a cure?
Sampling so many compounds against a single disease without the robot would take dozens of lab workers weeks or months.
"In the past, nobody would be spending this much effort looking at this big of a library of compounds," said Louis Scampavia, senior scientist at Scripps. "This allows us to not be myopic in our search for drug candidates."
Volume and speed are important.
It takes an average of 12 to 15 years for a drug to go from lab to market, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA. Of every 5,000 compounds tested, five will make it to clinical trials and, of those, only one will be approved for human use.
Paid for with a grant from the National Institutes of Health's Molecular Libraries Initiative, the robot can test millions of compounds against a host of diseases.
Just a few years ago, only mega-pharmaceutical companies such as Merck or Pfizer might have this kind of machine power to speed drug development, and then almost exclusively for drugs to treat more common diseases: diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's.
The NIH project puts publicly funded operations like Scripps on a par with drug companies. It aims to aid drug discovery in general, since all the findings will be available publicly.
More importantly, and for the first time, it gives public sector researchers the tools to tackle rare diseases, said Christopher Austin, a former Merck executive who heads NIH's Chemical Genomics Center that oversees the library initiative.
"These are disorders that disproportionately hit children because they are serious disorders," Austin said. "People don't live as long."
Of some 6,000 rare diseases, drug companies work on fewer than 100, Austin said. They have little incentive to create medicines for diseases that have so few victims.
But even with a tiny number of victims apiece, rare diseases affect one in 10 people.
"So the problem is it leaves many, many thousands of people who have rare diseases out in the cold," Austin said.
Biotech boom?
If drug discovery and medical advances cross the minds of government and economic development people in Florida, they run second to the growth potential for biotechnology.
The sector got its first big boost in the United States with the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act that allows U.S. universities, small business and nonprofits to retain intellectual property control of inventions arising from government-funded research.
So if a group of government-funded university researchers discovers an important drug, vaccine, way to diagnose a disease or any other important find or invention, they can patent it and make money from it. Before Bayh-Dole, they had to hand it over to the U.S. government, meaning no return for their work.
The act encouraged innovation by rewarding it and helped a U.S. biotech industry flower from a single startup in 1976 to a sector that generates $46 billion annually.
And experts say the industry is on the cusp of maturity that will increase profits for biotech firms and improve the lives of millions with bioscience products.
Proponents of the movement in Florida hope that expansion spills over to a state still heavily reliant on agriculture and tourism.
Since state and local leaders hammered out the Scripps deal, two major startups have followed: The Burnham Institute, which will be established in Orlando near the newly created medical school at the University of Central Florida, and Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, which will set up shop in Port St. Lucie.
"What Scripps did was really put Florida and its biotechnology industry on the map," said Russell Allen, president of BioFlorida, an industry trade group. "What that has done is given more attention to not only their institution and projects but to an industry we have been growing over the years."
It is why state leaders went after Scripps with the half billion dollars Florida got from the federal government after 9/11.
The cash was meant to give the state a shot in the arm after the tourism nosedive that followed the terrorist attacks.
Nancy Detert, then the Republican state representative for Venice and Sarasota who helped usher the deal through the state Legislature, said state leaders wanted to get the most out of that federal money.
Their hope is that bioscience will someday change Florida from a minimum-wage state to a technology powerhouse on a par with California.
"Wherever Scripps goes, they create a cluster effect," Detert said. "I think we are going to continue down that road."