By Jim Shamp
News & Publications Editor
As North Carolina’s bioscience community approaches its second quarter-century of global leadership, two things have become obvious:
- We’ve collected many laurels along the way; and
- Those laurels aren’t going to be anybody’s resting place.
Though her economic genes were historically linked to tobacco, trees and textiles, North Carolina has found new ways to express herself in recent decades by cashing in on biotechnology’s wide-ranging innovations.
Biotechnology is the term applied to a collection of technologies that use living cells or biological molecules to solve problems and make useful products. Biotech finds a place in everything from the complexities of a biomedical device to precious endangered medicinal herbs. With its many applications and possibilities, it’s also as familiar as fish and farming.
North Carolina’s business, academic and political leaders have been vindicated for the risks taken and the planning and investment they’ve committed to biotechnology during the last 25 years. The number of bioscience companies in the state has grown past 400, and increasingly these companies are locating outside Research Triangle Park. This growth already provides more than 48,000 clean, high-tech and high-paying biotech jobs statewide. Biotechnology is now being used in virtually every major industry. As a result, North Carolina trails only California and Massachusetts in total number of biotechnology companies.
But despite these successes, state residents need look no further than recent budget decisions by the General Assembly to see there’s still new growth on North Carolina’s biotech horizon. Specifically, legislators have approved historic funding for a new way to develop biotechnology statewide, fully funding the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s “Centers of Innovation” (COI) program.
The COI program was enabled through an initial 2007-08 state budget appropriation of $3 million in annually recurring funds. But that was enough to open the COI door, which is already leading to specialized statewide partnerships involving public and private research universities, community colleges, businesses, and government and other non-profit agencies. They’re joining forces to find practical life-science discoveries in research labs across the state and focus these within industry sectors to yield commercial products, industry growth and new company formation.
Centers of Innovation aren’t research buildings. The money isn’t going into lab equipment, bricks and mortar. Rather, COIs will create and serve technology development links among existing entities to help turn scientific discoveries into even more useful new products and services, and to help businesses overcome challenges in product development, initial production, regulatory approval, marketing and distribution.
COI formation starts with an invitation from the Biotechnology Center to groups developing a viable COI concept. They’re asked to submit a two-phase grant-funding proposal. Phase I provides a $100,000 planning grant, allowing up to a year for developing an organizational and a business plan. Phase II provides up to $2.5 million to support the COI’s development for the first four years.
The initial COIs are expected to specialize in the state’s most promising biotechnology developments: nanobiotechnology; marine biotechnology; advanced medical technologies; natural biotechnology and integrative medicine; biofuels and alternative energy; and biotech applications in functional foods.
These targets are a natural outgrowth of the regional office structure established during the last few years by the Biotechnology Center, capitalizing on the state’s mountains-to-coast geographic and cultural diversity. Each of the regions is gathering momentum and accelerating biotechnology sectors targeted by the COIs.
For example, the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University have received $5 million in planning money to jointly create a School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering, offering Ph.D. and professional Master’s degrees from a $58 million facility to be opened at the Millennium Campus of the Gateway University Research Park.
Just as the Triad has begun to establish itself as a “nano-brand,” Western North Carolina institutions are on the cusp of branding their natural biotechnology and integrative medicine expertise through the newly established Bent Creek Institute. Coastal North Carolina’s marine biotech focus is obvious in the new MARBIONC program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington as well as other marine and fisheries research activities taking place at multiple other North Carolina institutions.
And the biggest juggernaut is in biofuels. The Legislature’s recently approved 2008-09 budget provided $5 million in non-recurring funding to establish the non-profit Biofuels Center of North Carolina in Oxford to promote North Carolina’s developing biofuels economy.
The Biofuels Center, recommended as part of the Strategic Plan for Biofuels Leadership developed by a partnership of state research and economic development agencies in 2006 and early 2007, will assist universities, companies, and agencies in implementing various aspects of that strategic plan.
The plan, a legislative mandate to help North Carolina find alternatives to its 5.6 billion gallons of imported liquid fuels, has already led to the Center's recent incorporation. An administrator and staff are being hired to work at the Biofuels Center headquarters on the newly established North Carolina Biofuels Campus, a former U.S. Department of Agriculture tobacco research facility that was turned over in 2005 to the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs.
The Biofuels Center will encourage rural North Carolina production of biomass crops as biofuel feedstock, encourage and fund research, identify the most appropriate biofuels crops and support field trials, while also seeking and supplementing federal funding for research, development and facilities.
The Biofuels Center will also work to ensure that North Carolina takes a unified approach to state incentives for agricultural and manufacturing production, biofuels distribution, job creation, public education and workforce preparation.
In addition to funding for the Biofuels Center, the Legislature provided $1.5 million in non-recurring funding to North Carolina State University for the establishment of a new Center for Bioenergy Technologies. Besides conducting a broad array of energy research, that Center will operate a new Southeastern Energy Field Laboratory in Duplin County. The Laboratory will be the focal point for production and bioprocessing of various agricultural substrates into biofuels.
State lawmakers this session also approved money to complete construction of a new 210,000 square-foot, $160 million Genomics Sciences Building at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and $8 million in planning money for a proposed 275,000 square-foot, $135 million Biomedical Research Imaging Center for the Chapel Hill campus.
As new business opportunities evolve, more COIs may also take hold. Centers of Innovation are North Carolina’s new virtual lighthouses for economic growth, shining a guiding light on new biotechnology developments through the next 25 years and beyond.