PROMINENCE

Today, McGowan Institute serves as the hub for a $90 million per year research and clinical endeavor at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC related to regenerative medicine.  The scale of this cluster is unprecedented and exciting.  The McGowan Institute has been involved in the “spin out” of more than ten companies in the last seven years, and as a result, a small but vibrant industrial community has begun to take root.  The Center for Industry Relations is focused on how we can use this engine to bolster the effort and catalyze non-incremental change in regenerative and rehabilitative medicine. The Center will not be focused on the things we already do well, but rather on the opportunity we have to attract global companies to collaborate and establish a translational hub for commercializing regenerative technologies. 

The Institute is a large multi-disciplinary organization whose members and collaborators are geographically dispersed.  The success and the growth of the Institute over the last eight years (individually and in collaboration) is in itself testimony to the ability of the leadership and the availability of resources to build and to manage such complex teams.  An important aspect of our team is that the skill in network building that is the foundation of any large and complex interdisciplinary program is not concentrated in a single individual but rather in a team that fosters multidisciplinary collaboration and, most importantly, facilitates the transfer of technologies emerging from this research to the patients who need them. The Institute is prepared to spawn technology growth through academic/industrial partnerships, new venture incubation, Centers of Technology Excellence, and through programs like the Industry Magnet Program.

The McGowan Institute currently encompasses over 230 faulty, 500 post-doctoral associates, and over 600 graduate students.  Both directly and indirectly, UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh supported over 2000 regenerative medicine jobs in 2007, generating nearly $75 million in personal income in addition to direct, indirect, and induced economic impacts from payroll, purchasing, and capital expenditures,

In today’s global business environment, companies are able to source anything from any place at any time.  In theory, location should no longer be a source of competitive advantage; however, in practice, location remains central to competition. Today's economic map of the world is characterized by critical masses in one place of linked industries and institutions—from suppliers to universities to government agencies—that enjoy unusual competitive success in a particular field.  Geographic, cultural, and institutional proximity provides companies with special access, closer relationships, better information, powerful incentives, and other advantages that are difficult to tap from a distance. The more complex, knowledge-based, and dynamic the world economy becomes, the more this is true. Competitive advantage lies increasingly in local things—knowledge, relationships, and motivation—that distant rivals cannot replicate.

The business of regenerative medicine will be immense in scale (already over $1 billion in sales of regenerative medicine products occurred in 2007 as published on Market Research.com, Tissue Engineering & Stem Cell Technology Report 2007), and it is now vital for CFIR to ensure that the leading regenerative medicine research-based region also becomes the lead for the commercial phase of this rapidly emerging field. 

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