Endowed Chairs:
Collaboration calls scientist to join MUSC team
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Three days after arriving in Charleston, Richard Swaja seemed happy to be caught up in a whirlwind of activity.
“My schedule is pretty hectic,” he said with a chuckle as he relaxed for a moment in a modest conference room at the Medical University of South Carolina’s Basic Sciences building.
Not only is he MUSC’s Center of Economic Excellence Chair for Regenerative Medicine, he’s also a professor of cell biology and anatomy at the university, a professor of engineering at Clemson University and an adjunct professor with the University of South Carolina.
As if all that wasn’t enough, Swaja will serve as director of the S.C. Bioengineering Alliance.
“At MUSC my scientific focus, obviously, will be on regenerative medicine, that part of tissue engineering that involves taking cells that may not have a specific identity and growing them into a specific tissue, giving them their character, if you will,” Swaja said. “My second job, director of the Bioengineering Alliance, was one of the major attractions of this opportunity for me.
“It gives me the opportunity to work with major universities in creating a statewide bioengineering network to bring people together in a collaborative setting to advance the science. While that’s a challenging undertaking, I expect it to be tremendously fulfilling as these things come to pass.”
Swaja received a B.S. in physics from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and am M.S. in physics from the University of Pittsburgh. He received a Ph.D. in nuclear science from Carnegie-Mellon University, where he served as a Westinghouse Doctoral Fellow.
He’s also had a distinguished career in the private and government sectors, having served as a senior scientist at the Westinghouse Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory and as a senior research staff member at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Dr. Ray Greenberg, president of the university, said Swaja’s experience would be key to forging a closer bond between the life scientists at USC and MUSC and the engineers at Clemson and USC in the planning of a bioengineering facility on MUSC’s campus.
“One thing I’m hoping to foster is greater entrepreneurship in bioscience throughout the state,” Swaja said. “Here in Charleston, for instance, we have researchers doing meaningful research, but I want to help take it to the next step: application and commercialization.”
The challenge for Swaja’s scientists is finding the time to become fluent in venture capital, licensing, patent law and many other challenges that confront a startup business.
“What you need is a way to provide knowledge in a compact, easy-to-understand form, and I think the way to do that most effectively is to give them access to the right people, people who know business, know the business of startups in particular, and will provide support and advice to the academics along the way. In short, I need people who know the procedures of establishing a business and marketing a product,” he said.
To an extent, this kind of activity has been going on at MUSC for some time, but Swaja’s mandate is to make it a focus of his work.
“Right now, my task at hand is finding out who the people are in Charleston who want to participate in this process,” he said. “A lot of great ground work, particularly in regards to collaboration between the three research universities, has already been laid.”
One of the first steps in getting the ball rolling will be to get scientists and business people together to help them realize that there are exciting things happening in which both camps can participate, Swaja said.
“Once you rev up that enthusiasm, the next thing you absolutely have to do is keep the communications happening,” he said. “It’s one thing to have a meeting, but the efforts that succeed are the ones in which people keep communicating.”
In addition to preparing for his move to Charleston and for his classes, Swaja said he has been examining communities that have strong bioscience clusters, including Boston, San Diego and Chicago.
“Using those communities as an example, there seems to be certain common things you need to foster entrepreneurial bioscience,” he said. “First, you need to give these startups resources, then lab space, maybe some manufacturing space and perhaps tax breaks and breaks on waste disposal rates.
“The next thing you need is people who can explain not only how to start a new business, but how to keep it going after the first blush of enthusiasm has worn off. If you have those things, you’ll go a long way toward overcoming Charleston’s biggest drawback: the fact that it doesn’t have a rich history in bioscience. From there, I think Charleston will sell itself.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
|
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Version