2007 Minnesota Biosciences

Building Buildings

Perhaps more than ever, states are leaning on their higher-education institutions to ignite economic development by translating promising innovations into commercialized products. “Almost every public university across the country is operating under the increased expectation that their innovation will contribute to regional and economic development,” Mulcahy says. “We’ve really embraced that concept anew.”

To support research at the University of Minnesota, the state legislature has infused funds, typically in the form of general obligation bonding, into the construction of several new university facilities. These state-of-the-art facilities attract world-class researchers who are magnets for coveted federal research dollars.

Among the university’s high-profile landscape enhancements:

• The Cargill Building for Microbial and Plant Genomics, the nation’s first public-university building devoted exclusively to microbial and plant genomics—a discipline focused on the study of life at the foundational gene level. Cargill and the state of Minnesota split the cost of the $20-million building, which opened in May 2003.

• The McGuire Translational Research Facility, a $37-million dollar facility opened in 2005, which received $24.8 million in state bonding authority. Its mission is to expedite the typically arduous process of moving new discoveries from research laboratories to real-life clinical and commercial applications.

• The Plant Pathology Research Facility, slated for occupancy in early 2008, which will enable scientists to study and strategize protections against disease-causing threats to Minnesota’s crops and forests. It’s the final piece of a multi-phase, $24-million plant-growth facilities project, to which the state tendered more than $17 million.

The clock ran out on the establishment of a university-based Biomedical Sciences Research Facilities Authority in the 2007 Legislative Session, however, which would have provided $330 million in bonding to enable the university, over the next eight years, to build four new research facilities and wrap up the renovation of its 717 Delaware Building. According to the proposal, each new facility is estimated to house 40 faculty researchers, 120 research assistants, and attract an estimated $20 million annually in new research dollars.

Wahlstrom says that until the state makes just such a bold funding statement, the University’s efforts to plan research long term will be hampered, as will the state’s ability to attract investment in start-up enterprises.

“The community that invests in these kinds of technology and research needs to know Minnesota is in the game and they intend to be a long-term player. That message needs to be clear or investors will hesitate to put their money into the state,” Wahlstrom explains. “The message being communicated to the world now is diluted and it hurts our ability to attract investment from the outside.”

Partnering Productively

The University-Mayo Partnership enjoys longer-term commitment. The Minnesota Legislature has approved $24 million for the next biennium, $8 million annually for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, atop the $32 million the state has pumped into Partnership research and infrastructure since its inception in 2003, and the $21.7 million in bonding it provided for the Partnership’s new research facility.

“We’ve received a large fraction of what’s been devoted to biosciences,” Paller says of the Partnership. “And we’ve used that money very well.”