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From Tuesday's Eagle

The university-wide plans had called for the elimination of 93 faculty and 117 staff positions -- along with 100 vacant faculty and 175 vacant staff positions -- to help meet a "worst-case" state reduction of $39 million and an internal $21 million reallocation plan to bolster a centrally administered pool to fund strategic priorities.

Across the university, non-tenured faculty have been given notices.

On Monday afternoon, all nine lecturers and senior lecturers in the biology department were set to receive notices of non-renewal.

Vision 1920 is thinking Chancellor McKinney and System VP Giroir, who both have MDs, could pick up a couple of sections of Intro Biology. If their student evaluations are good enough, they could even get some teaching awards.

Changing the game in vaccine research

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal

Leaders of the Texas Plant-Expressed Vaccine Consortium today announced a biotherapeutic manufacturing initiative designed to show proof of concept for a landmark new technology that could dramatically increase the nation’s capability to produce vaccines for infectious diseases, including influenza.

We have a Texas Plant-Expressed Vaccine Consortium? Where have they been before now? Vision 1920 wonders if this is a new operation or if it has been around since A&M lost Charles Arntzen's project to express vaccines in bananas to Cornell. Or since A&Ms partnership with ProdiGene ran aground.

Project GreenVax, which utilizes tobacco plants rather than the current egg-based vaccine technology, holds the promise of shortening vaccine production to a fraction of the current time, allowing rapid response to newly emerging viruses not possible with current technology. The majority of funding for the project is provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
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“Project GreenVax and the NCTM are game-changers. They have the potential to transform not just vaccine production, but the entire biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry,” said Dr. Brett Giroir, vice chancellor for research for the A&M System and executive director of the Institute for Innovative Therapeutics (IIT), the newly established institute representing the partnership between the system’s multiple state-of-the-art research facilities.

Bayer Cropsciences has already taken similar technology to phase 1 clinical trials. G-Con's team had some connection to the Bayer system, but it seems like there was a complex combination of collaboration and competition involved. G-Con's founder was with Large Scale Biology, which didn't lose...they just ran out of time.

Expect the potbangers to quibble about whether Project Greenvax is really game changing. But maybe that's not the game Dr. Giroir, who brings his DARPA connections to A&M, is talking about.

In other vaccine news:

In a move touted as by many experts as questionable at best, PharmAthene has seen millions of dollars added to a 2003 contract without competing for it.

PharmAthene, which held closes ties to the late Congressman John Murtha and current DHS Under Secretary Tara O'Toole, was originally awarded the contract by BARDA. This new influx of money is part of a 2008 HHS request for a proposal for a second-generation anthrax vaccine.

Murano's performance evaluation explained

More brilliant PR from the Chancellor, as he gives an interview explaining events from last Spring:

Early in her presidency, McKinney says, Murano made a controversial promise, agreeing to hire the Board of Regents’ favored candidate to head research operations on the campus. Such a promise would fly in the face of well-established norms in higher education – where hires of this nature are typically subject to national searches and faculty input – but McKinney openly admits that he and the regents expected Murano to deliver on “her word.”

Onward with the NCTM!

As predicted, the Regents approved the NCTM on Friday. The Houston Chronicle reports

Friday's vote wasn't a surprise; regents already had earmarked $42.5 million of the grant to build the center, and the building is expected to open in 2011.

But the transition from a good idea with a fancy building to a profitable research enterprise and business venture will depend upon A&M officials finding additional funding and forming partnerships with other academic and health care enterprises.

Giroir said he expects an announcement on that subject soon.

Stay tuned.

A number of faculty members and alumni initially opposed the idea, citing it as a factor in no-confidence votes over the summer by both the A&M Faculty Senate and the Council of Principal Investigators, which represents faculty involved in research.

But the most vocal criticism appears to have died down.

That must mean they don't oppose the idea any more, right? What other possible explanation could there be?

Skins game

The last part of Bret Giroir's presentation was about the administrative structure of the Institute for Innovative Therapeutics. Giroir talked about how the participating components - TAMU, TAMUHSC, TEES, and AgriLife would each have primary responsibility for one of the components. In the current plan, TAMU will run TIPS, TAMUHSC will run TIGM, and TEES will run the NCTM. AgriLife will eventually have responsibility for another component, as the Institute expands into a "One Health Plus" mission, and becomes a campus bridging space between the university and the site of the planned new medical center.

The idea is that each of the System components will have "skin in the game" for all of the Institute components, with a larger share of the responsibility and revenue for the piece they run. A preliminary version of how this would work is in the strategic plan (pdf) posted on the CPI website.

The Chancellor and the CEO constituency committee should develop a model for sharing shortfalls and excess revenues across the Institution and participating components

A recommended strategy would be to have the institutional shortfalls and excess revenues assumed according to the following type of structure, using TIPS as an example. The percentage allocation should be decided upon by the Chancellor and the CEO Constituency Committee but should adhere to the principle of shared "skin in the game":

• 60% assumed by the primary owner (e.g. TAMU as primary owner of TIPS
• 20% assumed by the Institutional Partners (e.g. HSC and TEES)
20% assumed by TAMUS

The percentages presented by Giroir yesterday were different. The primary owner shares where reduced to 40%. Vision 1920 did not catch how the exact percentages were adjusted for the other components, but the plan included a way for AgriLife to have significant skin in the game even before it becomes a primary owner of a component.

The story in today's Eagle touches on the question of how much exposure is involved

"We would like to understand much better where the money is coming from and what the risks are," said Tim Hall, a professor in the College of Science.
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"I would say the risks are incredibly* minimal," he said in an interview after the meeting. "Anything you do has risks. I can only say that we have done more financial due diligence and have more [backup] plans that I have seen at any university in my experience."

The fiscal risks are hard to estimate, as they require assumptions about the income streams of TIGM, TIPS, and NCTM. Interestingly, Giroir said he expected TIGM to continue to lose money; as a core facility it is designed to subsidize other research (currently that subsidy is to other institutions outside TAMUS). This makes the outdated technology of the TIGM knockout collection a feature, not a bug; if more labs ordered TIGM mice, it would have an even bigger deficit!

The documents posted by the CPI include a couple of different sets of fiscal estimates. In the strategic plan, which projects out to 2013, TIGM is projected to lose $2-3M/year. TIPS has two projections based on how fast imaging equipment is purchased. These show a $5M profit from a "Governor's loan" and two ETF projects in FY2009, followed by losses ranging from $2-6M/year. This does not include a hoped-for $65M deal with Xerion. The strategic plan does not have a projection for NCTM. The CPI has also posted a best/worst case analysis by Greg Anderson, the System treasurer. This shows a best case of rising profits of 1-3M/year for TIPS and $7-8M/year for NCTM by 2017. TIGM is projected to lose money in the best case scenario. The worst case scenario still shows NCTM making a $4M profit by 2014. In this scenario, long-term NCTM profits almost offset losses by TIGM and TIPS by 2017. The basis for the income projections is not clear.

*Incredibly = in(not)+credibly.

Open forum with Bret Giroir

Vision 1920 is still trying to digest nearly 3 hours of open forum where Vice Chancellor Giroir, occasionally assisted by Vice Chancellor Diedrich dazzled the faculty with the real stories behind TIGM, TIPS, NCTM, and tIIT. Dr. Giroir took us all the way back to his days at Harvard (subtly reminding those uppity faculty that he had taken courses from a better class of profs than one finds in the faculty senate or CPI) when he and his roommate snuck into a restricted area to get research jobs. He described his rise through the ranks at UTSW and his time at DARPA, and explained how everything he's doing for us here at A&M is driven by his love of science and the memories of dead children he couldn't save. He pointed out how the tIIT project is about supporting our brave men and women overseas. And about saving the world from pandemic H1N1 influenza.

It's a sign of how depraved those faculty whiners are that some still seemed skeptical at the end of this marathon.

In addition to the revelation of the meaning of Giroir's chicken, much of the discussion was about TIGM. The highlights:

• Giroir and Diedrich setting the record straight on TIGM. Shorter version: Things are great and it's not the System's fault. TIGM was a university initiative from the start, driven by the late Dick Ewing, who was VPR at the time.
• Two free mice for A&M researchers (whether A&M researchers not working on mice can sell the rights to their pair on eBay was not addressed).
• TIGM has submitted lots of grants and is now likely to get one to do screening of ES cell lines for drug discovery (?). Unlike working with mice, this can be done on a large scale.

Vision 1920 overheard some faculty potbanger saying something like "the ES knockouts are heterozygous, so they'll only see effects if haploinsufficiency has a phenotype." He also said something about RNAi.

Giroir pointed out that TIGM is a core facility and that it is currently important for research at about 200 other universities. Someone else asked for examples - what do they expect TIGM to do, collect references to papers that acknowledge them?

This is just a little bit of what happened on Monday afternoon. Vision 1920 is having a harder time reconstructing the discussion about TIPS and NCTM, and welcomes comments to help reconstruct those parts.

Giroir's chicken explained

Previously Vision 1920 was perplexed by this figure in Brett Giroir's presentation. At his open presentation today, Dr. Giroir used it again, and explained what he has against chickens: As explained in this Scientific American article

Today's flu vaccines are prepared in fertilized chicken eggs, a method developed more than 50 years ago. The eggshell is cracked, and the influenza virus is injected into the fluid surrounding the embryo. The egg is resealed, the embryo becomes infected, and the resulting virus is then harvested, purified and used to produce the vaccine. Even with robotic assistance, "working with eggs is tedious," says Samuel L. Katz of the Duke University School of Medicine, a member of the vaccine advisory committee for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "Opening a culture flask is a heck of a lot simpler."

One of the goals of the NCTM is to revolutionize vaccine production by moving it out of eggs. This cutting edge idea is a niche in the vaccine industry where A&M can clearly leap ahead of the competition, which only includes the likes of Novartis, Baxter, and Merck.

Redefining the R&D enterprise

In March, Vice Chancellor for Research Giroir gave a presentation to the BioHouston Breakfast forum. A pdf of his powerpoint slides is available online.

Dr. Giroir describes a vision for the future of biomedical research at the Texas A&M University System. The figure shown here, slide 11 from his talk, is perplexing, since we were not there and have no additional transcript or notes. Slide 11 appears between the sections on TIPS and the NCTM. Vision 1920 wonders if this means that our highly-ranked Poultry Science Department will be left behind, when the rest of the research enterprise is taken over by the System.

Murano's accusations are patently false

More from the Chancellor's extended notes (pdf)

Last time committee on IP met - she pulled out papers on XOMA & berated Guy for making deal w/co. hurting the "A&M Brand" that she was dedicated to protecting - She misread info - & did not really know how to read the data - I don't know who gave her the info [concern is valid but approach & behavior totally inappropriate]

What deal? This one from Sept. 2008:

“We are very pleased to be working with XOMA, a biotechnology company with more than 25 years of experience as a successful innovator in antibody development and manufacturing,” said Brett Giroir, M.D., vice chancellor for research for the Texas A&M System. “We expect that the project will generate new opportunities for rapid translation of biomedical discoveries into life-saving products. The collaboration also holds the promise to develop manufacturing technologies that position the state of Texas as the partner of choice for biotechnology companies in the future.”

Dr. Brett P. "eHarmony" Giroir, in case you didn't know, is the System's Vice Chancellor for Research, and a leading biodefense researcher (Try a PubMed search on 'giroir bp AND biodefense'). Dr. Giroir knows Xoma well - they hold the rights on five of his patents.

Xoma was the subject of a 2007 profile in the New York Times:

Xoma, which Dr. Scannon started in 1981, has never earned an operating profit or marketed a drug of its own. And in the quarter-century since its birth, Xoma has managed to burn through more than $700 million raised from investors and other pharmaceutical companies.
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XOMA, which went public 20 years ago, is a case study of unfulfilled promise in the biotech business. It may also be a story that ends happily, if very belatedly, with success. The company’s management and some investors, including OrbiMed, say they are convinced that what they describe as Xoma’s dogged determination is finally making headway, or at least that its stock has room to grow.

The company’s stock has nearly doubled over the last year, hitting a 52-week high on Friday of $3.30, before closing at $3.04. Still, that is well below the stock’s record high of $32 a share, reached in both 1987 and 1991.

There's even more room to grow now; Xoma closed at $0.78/share today (down from $2.27 on the day the deal was announced).