By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

Attorney Bobby Pearce paced his office at the Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough law firm in downtown Charleston, punctuating his sentences with frequent physical and verbal gestures to the historic district outside his sixth-floor window.

“You know, it used to be that Greenville was in competition with Charleston and Charleston with Columbia and the cities with the rural areas, but I think that’s changed in a very profound way,” Pearce said.

“In the global economy, it’s not Meeting Street or King Street or any one community that’s competing for a share of the marketplace. It can’t be,” he said. “Today, I think there’s a real recognition that if we’re going to prosper, we have to work at economic development together.”

But it wasn’t just economics that fired Pearce’s enthusiasm. It was the nexus where the state’s educational institutions and its economic future meet. In Pearce’s view, it is in the halls of a collaborative academia that South Carolina’s future as a high-tech, high-wage center is steadily being born.

“Look at what’s going on with Clemson, the University of South Carolina and the Medical University of South Carolina,” Pearce said. “Soon, right here in town, you’ll be able to walk into new buildings where the partnerships will be seamless, and you won’t know whether the researcher you see is with USC or a student from Clemson.

“And the economic benefits of such a situation are only now beginning to be visualized,” he added.

Universities take leading role

Dr. Ray Greenberg, president of the Medical University of South Carolina, said that, in his view, these closer partnerships began to take shape two to three years ago when Clemson and MUSC agreed to develop a joint bioengineering program.

“(Clemson) agreed to locate two or three educators and 12 students on our campus, and that really was the first time that here at MUSC we had engineers working in close proximity of our researchers,” Greenberg said.

“Now, and thanks largely to our having pooled our expertise on some things, we’re in the midst of active discussions with a fellow who was the scientific director for the National Institute of Health’s biomedical engineering program.”

While MUSC has a well-established reputation in the realm of medical research, Greenberg said the university probably couldn’t have waged a successful effort to woo the scientific director without the added benefit of being able to share Clemson’s applied materials expertise.

It is that kind of research that goes a long way toward fostering the development of stronger, more durable artificial joints and synthetic parts the human body won’t reject.

The concept is simple: The more varied the potential research opportunities in the state, the more stimulating, professionally and intellectually, coming to South Carolina will be for researchers.

“(Partnerships) really bolster our appeal during the recruitment process, and as a result, we believe we’ll soon have someone with a real national identity involved in that program coordinating those efforts,” Greenberg said.

MUSC has forged a similar partnership with USC, consolidating both institutions’ colleges of pharmacy and merging their distinct efforts in the area of drug development and drug discovery.

“Cancer drugs have been a major focus of these efforts and, over time, I expect that we’ll be expanding our efforts related to heart disease, diabetes and other diseases,” he said.

A key component of both these efforts, Pearce said, is the state’s five-year-old endowed chair program, funded through the South Carolina Education Lottery.

The bill that created the program authorized $200 million to be spent in yearly increments of roughly $30 million to recruit the best scientists in specific areas of research and development.

Further, every dollar of public money that’s spent must be matched by funds from outside sources. Two years shy of the program’s reauthorization, both men believe it is now on the verge of producing its first economic, as well as educational, benefits.

“It’s probably the most innovative and important program the General Assembly has created in my 11 years of being in South Carolina,” Greenberg said. “It provides us with a source of revenue and adds to our prestige as institutions because it enables us to recruit nationally recognizable researchers in high-visibility sciences.

“At the same time, it’s much more than that. What stimulates the economy is not so much that they are on our faculty, but that, as they do their work here, the work generates research that, in turn, results in patents.”

And already, they are often resulting in much more.

For instance, Dr. Charles Smith, who studies compounds that ultimately become cancer drugs, was enticed to leave the Hershey Medical School at Penn State University precisely because he could expand his research in collaboration with MUSC partners who bring expertise in medical pharmacology, engineering, computer sciences and even physics to the table.

“These are things you normally don’t find in abundance at a medical university,” Greenberg said.

But Smith didn’t bring just his suitcase, research and family with him to Charleston. Smith, who holds numerous patents, also brought along Apogee Biotechnology Corp., a 12-employee company he founded to bring his research to market.

“Chuck is kind of the poster child for the kind of collaboration that’s going on today,” Greenberg said. “Not only do we have a wonderful researcher on staff, but Charleston will be his company’s base of operation.”

Another poster child is Dr. John Schaffer, also from Pennsylvania, who came to MUSC from the University of Pittsburgh. Schaffer’s research involves sophisticated computer simulations of patients in emergency situations. Those simulations can then be used in the training of doctors and nurses.

Schaffer came to South Carolina, Greenberg said, because collaborative agreements between MUSC, USC and Clemson allowed him to do something here that wasn’t possible in Pennsylvania: a roll out of his research on a truly statewide scale.

“Right now he’s in the process of setting up research and training facilities near each of the universities in Charleston, Columbia and Greenville,” Greenberg said. “And while that’s an exciting and important development in its own right, what makes it even more so is he’s got relationships with the manufacturers of the equipment.

“Long term, my hope is that we’ll see some of these manufacturers move here and South Carolina become a leading center for this kind of research,” he added.

Teaching hospitals in the loop

The biosciences aren’t the only area in which collaboration and the setting aside of regional, institutional and public/private rivalries is paying big dividends.

By partnering with BMW and Michelin Tires, Clemson has been able to access state lottery funds and create four endowed chairs in engineering at its burgeoning International Center for Automotive Research.

But this summer, at least, it has been the collaboration in the biosciences that has garnered the headlines. In August, the three research universities in collaboration with the state’s three teaching colleges, operating under the umbrella name Healthcare SC, received a $21 million grant from the Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Endowment.

“Unfortunately, in South Carolina today there is no equivalent to BMW or Michelin in the biomedical field,” Greenberg said. “But what we do have are teaching hospitals that are a huge part of the economy and also happen to open up additional avenues for funding and research.”

The Duke Endowment, founded by James B. Duke, is the largest private foundation in the Carolinas. One of its missions is to help fund medical research and patient-care issues for the benefit of not-for-profit hospitals.

Believing that the universities and the state’s teaching hospitals—Palmetto Healthcare, the Greenville Hospital System and Spartanburg Regional—were following common but not intertwined missions, Greenberg and others brought together what essentially is now a six-headed research program.

“The thing about collaboration is that you can’t go into it expecting it to be an exclusive club,” he said. “If you do, your efforts eventually run their course. In this case, by expanding the tent, if you will, we were able to share in the largest grant the Duke Endowment has ever bestowed in the health care arena.”

As part of their commitment to the partnership, each of the teaching hospitals has pledged to raise an additional $21 million to match the endowment and fund research projects.

Pearce sits on the nine-member panel that overseas the program, determines what the most meritorious research proposals are and then passes those on to a panel of experts in other states to evaluate the uniqueness and promise of each finalist’s proposal.

One of the first projects to be funded will focus on patient safety and clinical effectiveness.

“I think in the end these efforts underscore one of the great strengths of our state when it comes to research and economic development, growing business clusters and the like. We have a tremendous number of people here who are willing to subvert individual agendas to the common collective good,” Pearce said.

“We all want to grow and prosper individually, and none of these institutions is giving up control of its individual agendas by collaborating with others. It’s just a matter of how effective you want to be fulfilling common goals.”

Greenberg agreed.

“What it comes down to in the end is that we, and each of the entities we’re collaborating with, are very specialized,” he said. “We see our best opportunity to compete, with what in reality is the rest of the world, by leveraging our collective strengths.”

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.

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