By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

Andrew Sorenson, in his fifth year as president of the University of South Carolina, was driving near Columbia after two days of meetings with his counterparts in the Southeastern Conference and still marveling over one consultant’s particularly chilly reception.

“We had a presentation by a firm from Austin, Texas, in which it was proposed that all 12 universities in the conference work together to develop common themes in intellectual property,” Sorenson said.

“The firm’s idea was that we would all benefit from pooling our resources, sharing our scientists and ultimately sharing the royalties generated by their ideas. In theory, that’s an excellent idea.”

But, Sorenson quickly added, the presentation was not well received.

Some of his colleagues were openly hostile to the idea. Sorenson attributed some of the resistance to the schools having failed to successfully create similar, smaller partnerships within their own states. He also suspected that the competitive spirit that drives the region’s athletic rivalries may have played a role.

“Whatever the reason, that response really drove home to me how special the collaboration between our state’s research universities truly is,” he said. “It’s remarkable. And it’s continuing to evolve.”

Five years ago, when Sorenson paid his first visit to the Clemson University campus in Clemson, S.C., he was surprised to be greeted by print, radio and television reporters as he stepped off an elevator in the administration building.

“They said that no USC president had ever visited the campus, except for a football or basketball game,” he said, emphasizing that he wasn’t criticizing his predecessors.

Today, not only do Sorenson, Clemson President James Barker and MUSC President Ray Greenburg meet monthly to discuss their partnership, Health Sciences South Carolina, a collaborative effort to advance the health sciences in the state, but they’re also working aggressively together to lure the nation’s best scientists to their campuses as endowed chairs through the state’s Centers of Excellence Program.

“Simply put, we’ve come to the conclusion that rather than try to compete by duplicating each other’s programs, we combine our resources and play to each of our strengths for the benefit of all,” Sorenson said.

The seeds of today’s collaborative spirit in South Carolina were actually sown by a rejected job offer, he said.

“Ray Greenburg and I share an academic interest in epidemiology (the medical study of epidemics), and I had once tried to recruit him for a faculty position (but) he declined,” Sorenson said.

Greenberg at the time had already embarked on the administrative path that would lead him to the top post at MUSC in January 2000.

Given their shared academic interests, Sorenson immediately asked Greenberg if he’d like to collaborate on some mutually beneficial programs for their respective universities. When Greenberg agreed, Sorenson set his sites on meeting Clemson’s James Barker.

“We’d never met, nor had I ever been to Clemson, but just as Ray had been, James was immediately intrigued by the prospect of collaboration,” Sorenson said.

While Clemson and USC began to actively collaborate on several research projects, Sorenson and Greenberg set about founding Health Sciences South Carolina in partnership with the Palmetto Health System in Columbia and the Greenville Hospital System.

Clemson and the Spartanburg Regional Medical Center signed on the following year.

The partnership deepened in 2002 when the General Assembly established the S.C. Research Centers of Economic Excellence.

The Research Centers of Economic Excellence Act authorized the state’s three public research institutions—MUSC, USC and Clemson—to use S.C. Education Lottery funds, matched dollar for dollar with private funds, to strengthen research and create endowed professorships in areas that will enhance the state’s economy.

Today, a nine-member panel evaluates proposals from prospective endowed chairs, with greater credit given to those that would involve collaboration between research universities.

The program allows each university to claim an area of expertise for the endowed chair to work within, but not exclusively for, Sorenson said. For instance, because Clemson is the only one of the three to have a School of Architecture, it will be the lead institution when an endowed chair for historic preservation is hired. Likewise, USC and MUSC have taken the lead on the endowed chairs related to medicine and pharmacology.

“Again, we’re not competing as we would on the football field. We’re having rational discussions to determine the best way to benefit us all,” Sorenson said.

“And in some cases, the lines are significantly blurred. For instance, in the case of Dr. John Schaefer, who uses mannequin-based simulators to improve clinical effectiveness and patient safety, we were all involved in recruiting him, so I feel that, while he lives in Charleston, he’s really a professor for all of us.”

The economic benefits of the endowed chairs program are two-fold, Sorenson said. On the one hand, because the chairs are essentially assigned to the institution with strength in their discipline, a lot of the infrastructure they need is already in place at one site, but their professorships extend beyond one campus.

“It can cost a couple of million dollars to set up a laboratory, so it’s a tremendous help to USC if one of our endowed chairs can utilize facilities at MUSC and save us those costs,” Sorenson said.

The other economic benefit is the creation of new businesses in the state.

“As a rule, I forbid these guys from running their own businesses,” he said of the endowed chairs. “While they are exceptionally bright scientists and engineers, it’s simply not true that just because you have a high IQ, you can do anything.”

As an example of what he’d like to see happen as the endowed chair program moves forward, he points to the experience of Michael Myrick, a USC chemist who is not an endowed chair. Myrick came up with a laser-based process for checking pharmaceuticals for impurities while they are still liquid, before being manufactured into pill form.

Big pharmaceutical companies want such a system because impurities found at a later stage could halt production of a drug and potentially cost them millions of dollars.

“Michael and I had a discussion about his work and ultimately concluded that it was more important that he continue his research than become a CEO,” Sorenson said.

Enter Walter Alessandrini, the former CEO of two companies who had recently retired to South Carolina but already was feeling restless.

He formed the Ometric Corp., the Columbia, S.C.-based company that is now developing the process Myrick came up with for commercial applications.

“The typical path for these things is for the researcher to file a disclosure with the university, basically saying, ‘I have this exciting idea.’ Then we have our patent attorneys meet with him and put him into an incubator with science and business students to begin fashioning a business model for his proposed product,” Sorenson said.

“Walter’s job, when we brought him in on this, was to find the venture capital necessary to bring the company to fruition. In this case, Walter brought in Sequoia Capitol, a big venture capital firm from the West Coast.”

Since then, AFT Ventures and Trelys Funds have also invested in the company.

Sorenson said he believes the endowed chairs will greatly stimulate and assist in more of these kinds of business developments.

“What we’re trying to do is ramp up the success of our research universities by creating enclaves of scholars,” he said. “We want young researchers to say, ‘Richard Webb is there, well I want to be there too.’”

Webb is USC’s Endowed Chair of Nanotechnology.

“That kind of response will help create research critical mass in the state and, hopefully, begin creating companies offering high-paying jobs at an accelerated rate,” Sorenson said.

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

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