DECEMBER 10, 2007

PRIAVE INDUSTRY HAS ROLE IN PUBLIC MEDICAL SERVICE, RESEARCH

Our state university is taxpayer-funded. Our medical school is taxpayer-funded. Our regional trauma center is taxpayer-funded. Our Roswell Park Cancer Institute is taxpayer-funded. All graduate medical education in Buffalo is taxpayer-funded. Where taxpayer funds go, taxpayer oversight must go along.

And as public money continues to pour into medical research and education, let's not kid ourselves that our chances for excellence depend on the buildings we build.

Right now, today, three years after ECMC stopped being a County hospital and became an independent public benefit corporation like Roswell Park, we have the best trauma center in New York State. This move gave ECMC autonomy from the claws of County management and gave them the ability to achieve greater success.

That's excellence. ECMC is the top, number one trauma center in New York State. Part of the reason: every doctor at ECMC is on the faculty of UB Medical School.

That's why I'm so glad to read the comments of Dr. Edmund Egan, an acquaintance, who is not only a professor at UB, but also a distinguished researcher.

I just get nervous when our business community doesn't understand that it has a support role to play, and not just a profit-making opportunity, when it comes to health care and biomedical research.

Dr. Egan is right. We should learn from Cleveland and Pittsburgh – where the major corporations and foundations underwrite, support and help fund excellence. But I'm not sure if the County Executive-elect (as Dr. Egan contends) will have much of a say in this. The best he can do is bring his business acumen to the business community and hope they're serious about a biomedical corridor.

And let's learn from Harvard, where there is a system of affiliated hospitals. Brown University has a medical school in Providence, Rhode Island, which is about as big as Buffalo. Both Brown and Harvard medical schools have multiple hospitals in their system. Sometimes I think that our business community wants a medical research factory building, like Bethlehem Steel, instead of centers of excellence all over town.

Our medical research and treatment system is public. Can private industry help? Sure – and it should start by funding research, funding professors and funding students. Let's get excellence first, and put the profit-making off until later.

And let's get going on this now, because it takes time to get better. In Pittsburgh, there are major corporate and foundation contributors to the excellent medical research there. Creating excellence in bioinformatics in Pittsburgh took ten or fifteen years of coordinated effort between Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, the major foundations and the TEC business group. They've sponsored an annual "business plan" competition to help start-up entrepreneurs get going with new medical and bio-science work.

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