Providence seen as potential hub for brain research

ROBSON
ROBSON

When the Brown University researchers who formed BrainGate Co. enabled a paralyzed woman to operate a robotic arm through thought, scientists around the world heard about the breakthrough developed in Providence.
It was the latest success to burnish the area’s reputation in the growing field of brain-science research, a field Rhode Island leaders hope will lead the state’s transition toward a technology and knowledge-based economy.
Exactly how big an economic engine brain-science research will eventually become in Providence is difficult to say, but the optimism among leaders in the medical, academic and business communities is still growing.
“All the pieces are there to put something substantial into the marketplace,” said Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce President Laurie White, a leading proponent of expansion in the medical and education sector. “And with brain science – especially with the diseases baby boomers are dealing with – what could be more appropriate? It’s the last frontier.”
At the center of plans to grow Providence into a world-class research hub is the collaborative effort between the major brain-science research centers in the state – especially those from Rhode Island Hospital and the Brown Institute for Brain Science.
That process leapt forward two years ago with the founding of the Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute at Rhode Island Hospital, which is designed to bring together clinicians and researchers from Brown, the Warren Alpert Medical School, the Providence Veterans Administration Medical Center, Bradley Hospital, Butler Hospital, Hasbro Children’s Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital.
“What we are trying to do is meld the two efforts into a joint initiative,” said John Robson, administrative director at the Norman Prince Institute. “It is still new, but we are developing programs to stimulate joint-research projects between clinicians and scientists and get funds for pilot research studies.”
In addition to bringing together different organizations researching the brain, the Norman Prince and Brown institutes link traditionally independent fields – neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatry. In October, the Norman Prince Institute received three grants totaling $600,000, the first philanthropic donations since the institute was founded.
Accelerating the change was a corresponding leadership turnover during the last two years in neurology, neuroscience, psychiatry and pediatric neurosurgery.
“That [turnover] hardly ever happens and those positions have been filled with people who were recruited with the knowledge that this [integration] has been started,” Robson said. “Rather than in the past, where someone comes in to be chairman of a department and would focus just within their department, we are trying to build something that is more strategic.”
The Norman Prince Institute draws inspiration from the Montreal Neurological Institute in Quebec, where both Robson and Clinical Director G. Reece Cosgrove worked before coming to Rhode Island.
Another model people have discussed is Pittsburgh, a city Rhode Island officials have studied for economic development and where the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is a dominant force.
In Rhode Island, the fact that Brown and the hospitals are separate entities has presented one barrier to that kind of growth that may start to break down around collaborations like neuroscience.
While legal and administrative hurdles remain, Robson said going forward he sees more academic-clinical integration as all sides work toward a “robust clinical-trial center” with inpatient and outpatient clinics attached to the research facility.
“I would hope we would have a facility where the people who are doing cutting-edge research would have easy access to patients and patients would have access to cutting-edge research,” Robson said.
To get there, Robson sees the institute, now on the sixth floor of Rhode Island Hospital, eventually needing a building of its own.
White at the Providence Chamber has mentioned the future space needs of the institute as another reason for a new building in the former Jewelry District to house an advanced nursing center, plus lab and clinical space. For the Slater Technology Fund, Rhode Island’s public venture-capital firm, neuroscience has been a fertile ground for investment.
The fund was an early investor in Cyberkinetics (the wound-down predecessor of BrainGate), and has also financed Mnemosyne Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is working on cognitive-dysfunction drugs. Other companies with Slater investments include Afferent and Selva Medical.
Slater Managing Director Richard Horan said he now has his eye on Tivorsan Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Brown spinoff working on drugs for muscular dystrophy, and others.
“Biology is the youngest science and neuroscience is the youngest of them all, but it happens to be an area where Brown and Lifespan have a strategic commitment and [the state has] the attacker’s advantage,” Horan said. “It presents a very fertile environment for entrepreneurs. There is a broad terrain where advances in basic research need to be translated into clinical practice. It is the entrepreneurs that facilitate that transfer.”
At the Brown Technology Ventures Office, which works with faculty to commercialize research, Managing Director Katherine Gordon said brain science is a “really big department” for the university.
“It is a huge area of focus for us with a lot of opportunities for commercialization in both treatment and diagnosis,” Gordon said. “The key thing for me is always critical mass – that is how we are going to make programs well-known. I think [Providence is] really very competitive. We have got a lot of talent and are becoming better known over time.”
Although it’s usually not the first thing on the minds of researchers, Robson at Norman Prince said building an academic and clinical reputation should bring wider economic benefits.
“I think if you can build an academic reputation, then you will attract patients from outside your normal catchment area and you will have interest from pharmaceutical companies for clinical trials, which you would hope add some spinoff activity of startup companies,” Robson said. “If you create an atmosphere where people are working together thinking about patients, those things have economic potential.” •

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