Virginia Tech expects to move hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students to Roanoke as it creates a medical hub with Carilion Clinic that poises the partners to become powerhouses in understanding and treating specific diseases.
Leaders of the public university and the private health care system have announced ambitious plans to thrust their work onto the global stage by building on the success they’ve found since jointly creating a research institute and medical school eight years ago.
The partnership could remake Tech. Health sciences is a small part of the university but one of its biggest strengths, said President Timothy Sands.
“People think of us for engineering and architecture, and a generally outstanding program in agriculture,” he said. “Health science has just poked its head up. I think there is the potential for the health sciences and technology domain to be roughly a quarter or a third of what we do at Virginia Tech in the long run.”
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Tech’s board of visitors is expected Monday to promote the research institute’s director to a position overseeing the expansion.
Sands said the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute already attracts talented scientists with national and international reputations. “It is perfectly situated for growth. We want to take it much bigger,” he said.
A new $67 million building that doubles the size of the research institute is just one component of the plan. Tech plans to invest $100 million in health sciences and technology in the next eight years.
Tech and Carilion leaders said the new collaboration will build their institutions’ national and international reputations, launch business endeavors, create high-paying jobs, attract top-notch clinicians and faculty and improve the health of people living in Southwest Virginia. It will lead to additional buildings in Roanoke and Blacksburg, require a strong presence by Tech in Roanoke and merge the two economies.
For starters, Tech will move components of its high-demand biomedical engineering program and its nascent neuroscience discipline to Roanoke. Within the next five years, 500 to 1,000 undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and scientists will be on the Riverside campus.
The plan calls for 25 new research teams — double the current census — to attract private investors, who, in turn, will spawn start-up companies and satellite offices of large firms.
“If I look out five years, somewhere between here to downtown Roanoke, there will be an exciting hub, even more than it is now,” said Carilion Clinic CEO Nancy Agee from her office at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. “There will be a spin-off of growth and new businesses. I think it’s a real catalyst for change for the whole region.”
A continuing collaboration
Tech and Carilion joined forces in 2008 to create the Virginia Tech School of Medicine and Research Institute. The project marked a shift away from earlier plans by the partners to create a biomedical park on land south of downtown Roanoke that the city had purchased, cleared of industrial buildings and sold to Carilion.
The first class of students arrived in 2010 prepared for a research-focused medical education. By then Michael Friedlander, the founding director of the research institute, had brought in several research teams with the goal of recruiting 30 teams within five to seven years.
“We have grown at a rate faster than what people expected,” Friedlander said of both the number of scientists working in Roanoke and the quality of their work that “is chipping away at being right on the world stage.” Brain research is at the forefront, and work on specific cancers and infections is making strides, he said.
But some programs “are constrained because they’re a certain limit in size, and we are almost out of space,” he said. “You have a certain number of people, and you are either going to compete at the highest level and have the team that has outstanding people and the critical mass, or you are not.”’
The research institute is expected to top out at 30 teams by next year. The scientists have published nearly 400 papers in peer-reviewed journals, applied for 30 patents, spawned several companies and entered into collaborations with more than a dozen companies and 100 universities and medical centers from 27 countries.
While the research institute was taking off, Carilion’s own transformation was underway. The health system morphed from seven hospitals and a collection of primary care practices into an integrated health care provider.
Agee said Carilion more than doubled its physicians, now employing 1,000, which includes 280 residents and fellows, and has brought in more specialists and subspecialists. The research institute and med school are credited with attracting specialists.
Carilion recently opened the Institute for Orthopaedics and Neurosciences in the former Ukrops building on Franklin Road, purchased the Shenandoah Life building on Brambleton Avenue and plans to add another 15-story tower at Roanoke Memorial. Carilion’s Jefferson College of Health Sciences last year added two doctoral programs in nursing and public health.
Meanwhile, the School of Medicine’s research-intensive curriculum is attracting attention. This year, 4,610 students applied for the 42 openings. Officials have delayed expansion until research teams are added, since placing students with teams is vital to their mission, said the school’s dean, Dr. Cynda Johnson.
‘Innovation districts’
In 2014, as the research institute neared capacity, Sands was named Tech’s new president. Agee said she and Sands began talking about what to do next.
“I’m not sure our vision, at that point, was as big as it got to be. It was more incremental,” she said. Then Tech hired Thanassis Rikakis as provost.
“The new provost got very excited and said we could do a lot more than that, and we began to have some wonderful conversations,” she said.
Rikakis came to Blacksburg from Carnegie Mellon University, which has an innovation center that facilitates bringing research into the global market.
Other universities and cities are developing so-called innovation districts to attract investors to research.
The Brookings Institution, which is studying the rise of these districts, defines them as “geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators and accelerators. They are also physically compact, transit-accessible, and technically-wired and offer mixed-use housing, office, and retail.”
Rikakis suggested creating a health sciences and technology innovation district that would pull in Tech’s expertise with technology across all its disciplines and unite it with Carilion’s strong clinical practices. This is the future of medicine, he said.
“If you look at one of the major influences on health sciences, it will be technology,” he said.
Rikakis envisions Tech and Carilion cornering the market on a big-data approach to personalized medicine in rural areas — something that could significantly change public health.
The extensive medical data Carilion has collected throughout Southwest Virginia will be coupled with Tech’s data on subjects like water quality, nutrition and agriculture and be used to find new ways to apply technology to improving health. Few universities have such extensive knowledge of rural areas, and the data will differentiate what they are doing from all others, he said.
“You have the science student, the engineering faculty, the physician at Carilion and the public health specialists at Jefferson [College of Health Sciences], and they talk and they come up with this idea for personalized care,” Rikakis said. “So now you say, ‘OK, I want to make this into a product that can end up on people’s phones so they can do better in the health services in rural areas.’
“You need the businesses and venture capitalists, but at the same time, you don’t want those folks who came up with the idea to go to Boston to do that,” he said.
The capital and product development will stay in Roanoke because the critical mass of talent and data will remain here, he explained.
The innovation district has a bricks-and-mortar component as well: the second research building for Roanoke; housing for students, visiting faculty and industry partners; and, eventually, a research institute in Blacksburg.
“The idea behind an innovation district is to attract talent that can live, work and play in a region, without the need to commute, who can run into other people of talent just in the routine things you do in a day,” Sands said. “It is a physical concentration of talent in the same physical space.”
Innovation districts stand in contrast to corporate research parks that were built in the middle of nowhere, with each entity having its own building and people rarely interacting.
“Here’s a model where everything is integrated,” Sands said. “When you talk to young people in their 20s and ask what kind of environment they want, this is what they say.”
To thrive, innovation districts require a city. Rikakis said Roanoke — an urban center in a non-urban setting — offers the best of both worlds for gathering specialized data and for attracting people who find appeal in having the amenities of city life but seek to be near nature.
The strong public-private partnership between Tech and Carilion is also a draw, he said. Building a critical mass of talented people who are focused on a few areas will put Roanoke at the front of the pack in attracting investors, he said.
The ecosystem that grows in an innovation district says to outsiders, “We’re open to business. We want to share our ideas. We want to share our land,’ ” he said.
Tech is working on a simplified blanket agreement for the sharing of intellectual property with businesses to make it easier to partner with the university, he said.
Rikakis said this will help draw investors’ money and flip the current practice of investors luring away researchers.
“The bet is, once the idea happens here, the investor is going to say, ‘I don’t want to move you from here because you need all the connections you have to this unique setup,’ ” he said.
“Virginia Tech and Carilion are all in. Roanoke is, too,” Sands said. “The question is, will we be able to bring in other research universities and businesses and be successful in building out the innovation district? I’m confident we can.”
Much of that confidence relies on the partnership’s initial success. Friedlander said the research institute has landed 25 of the 28 research teams it sought, and has lost just one that was lured away to Boston by a $40 million offer from an investor.
“People around the country are just shocked at what we have,” Friedlander said. “We’re on the map, and many people are surprised because just six years ago we didn’t exist.”
He said the new research teams will focus on four key areas: infectious diseases; regeneration of the cardiovascular system; a specific brain tumor occur ring in humans and dogs that scientists and Tech’s veterinary school are working to treat; and brain research already underway at the institute.
Identifying and excelling in very specific areas will differentiate this innovation district from others, Rikakis said.
“If you can really advance, people will pay attention,” he said. “You need to be ambitious about this.”
Scientists, Friedlander said, want to be part of building something and will find the innovation district attractive.
“There’s a nonlinear energy, at a certain point, that is contagious and infects everyone from undergraduates to old-timey professors who have become a little bit jaded,” Friedlander said. “That’s what we’re hoping for, that this will be that kind of place and catch the attention of the whole country.”
A unique partnership
Other cities and universities have created innovation districts or are looking to expand into technology-based health care. But Virginia Tech and Carilion’s partnership is unlike other teaching and research-based hospitals, in which the university owns the health system.
Leaders of both entities said they are not striving to be like the University of Virginia or Duke University. Instead, they are inventing a new approach by drawing on the strengths of each partner.
“Duke and UVa are an example of where the clinical service and the research are under the same umbrella,” Rikakis said. “Virginia Tech is not set up to do this. Taking it on would destroy us. Instead of saying we have to take everything in house — that was the 20th-century model — we’re saying no, we don’t have to. We don’t have ownership of the clinics; we don’t have ownership of the idea. We want the idea to get out there and create companies and a great city of Roanoke.”
Growing the partnership is even more important for the region’s economic growth than a singular jobs announcement, Agee said. “We’re continuing to build in the community. Sometimes you can take it [existing enterprises] for granted and say so what, but building for our region makes it stronger. So it’s not about the one big, splashy thing.”
For Carilion, the partnership will allow the health system to extend its reach, improve patient care and become a destination for treating certain conditions.
Friedlander sees a complementary rise for the research institute.
“So what is the payoff? To really elevate us to a very high level of national and international competitiveness of medical research,” he said. “That is the No. 1 priority. However, that has a number of indirect benefits, not the least of which is economic development.”
For Tech, the innovation district fits with its vision. Sands said the university’s visioning process, Beyond Boundaries, will report soon on the thematic focuses that Tech will call destinations, one of which is the adaptive brain.
“We are looking at what we can imagine Virginia Tech becoming internationally as a land grant university,” Sands said.
The next steps
On Monday, the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors is expected to confirm Friedlander’s appointment to vice president of health sciences and technology. He will continue, for now, to run the institute as he oversees the development of the new building. He will also be charged with working across Tech’s other colleges, collaborating on projects, pulling in faculty and researchers and finding business partners.
Construction on the new building could get under way next year, if the state’s bond issue goes as planned. In its bill, the General Assembly tied $1.6 billion in spending on projects to the release of 2014 money for the renovations of Capitol Square in Richmond, including construction of a new General Assembly building. The governor has yet to act on the politically contentious condition.
The bond includes $46.7 million in state money to be matched by $21 million from Tech and Carilion, with $14 million from Tech, $5 million from Carilion and $2 million of in-kind land contribution.
Sands said he is not concerned about the funding.
A concept design of the building is in hand, but the actual site has yet to be identified. Carilion owns several vacant parcels at the Riverside site, but the building also might be set on the parking lot across from the research institute.
Agee said Carilion wants to work with Tech to figure out how to accommodate growth for the medical school, clinical services, education space and supporting services.
“We are going to be very careful about how we are going to use that space, and plan well,” she said. “Is that enough land over time? I kind of hope not. I hope we are growing even more.”