WHY LSI?

By Craig Parker, member, LSI Advisory Board and Managing Director and Head of Biotechnology Equity Research, Lehman Brothers

One of the many reasons for my passion about the LSI is the important function it serves in bridging gaps that exist in life science research – a structural gap between academics and industry and a gap between academic disciplines. In fact, unifying these gaps is one of the challenges for the biotechnology industry as it strives to remain biologically relevant while enhancing its focus on commercial opportunities. To put that challenge another way, the biotechnology industry has to reconcile a requirement for innovation with the need to invest in specific product opportunities.

The biotechnology industry has largely conceded that it cannot undertake extensive discovery research. The industry is much better suited to identifying translational research that may have therapeutic applications with commercial potential and integrating that research into an existing disease or market focused effort. The system is anything but efficient, however, and there is no roadmap to transitioning a basic discovery to translational research to product opportunities. While I am certainly not looking to the LSI to endeavor to actively "bridge" these functional areas, I am optimistic that the very nature of the Institute will help stimulate those inside and outside the University of Michigan community to form those bridges.

The interdisciplinary mandate of the Institute can also serve as a "role model" for one of the issues that has been an obstacle to greater success within the biotechnology industry –the balkanization of groups resulting from their formal scientific training. Chemists may never have a tremendous amount in common with molecular biologists, but the formal structure of most graduate and post-graduate training programs, creates even more polarization than may be intrinsic to the disciplines. What makes this division even more problematic is that the requirement for collaboration is becoming more acute with the explosion in our understanding of the complexity of disease, model systems and biology.

I am very optimistic that in addition to spurring important scientific contributions, the interdisciplinary nature of the LSI will impart a new sensibility to academic research and scientific training - a sensibility that science should not only take advantage of collaboration but make it a vital part of research.