PROVIDENCE – The man with a vision that seeks to marry the future of Brown University as a major research hub with the economic development plans for the new $250 million life sciences complex proposed by Wexford Science and Technology and CV Properties is Dr. Jack Elias, the dean of the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University.

Under Elias’s stewardship, the plans now under discussion would have Brown become a major tenant in the space, to serve as the new home for both the Brown Institute for Brain Science [BIBS] and the newly formed Brown Institute for Translational Sciences [BITS] as well as the Brown Biomedical Innovations, Inc. [BBII], an incubator space for new startups, in partnership with the Brown University Technology Ventures office.

[On Nov. 23, Brown University President Christina Paxson had voiced her strong support for the school’s participation in development in the former Jewelry District with an emphasis on translation science, saying that Brown was “all in” and would be an “anchor partner,” in an address before the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. Exactly what that meant in terms of the proposed development has been somewhat vague, until now, when new details emerged as part an exclusive interview by ConvergenceRI with Elias.]

The discussions with the developers are moving along, Elias told ConvergenceRI. “Obviously, for this to happen, the cost of doing research in that building has to be comparable to the cost of doing research in a standard university building,” Elias said, offering a glimpse into the focus of ongoing negotiations.

These things are now being looked into, Elias continued, but he said there was also an ongoing planning process to look at moving much of Brown’s biomedical research into this area – “literally two blocks from where we’re sitting right now,” Elias told ConvergenceRI. Construction on the first stage of the proposed Wexford facility is scheduled to begin in 2017.

The strategic plan
Elias was recruited to come to Brown from Yale University Medical School in 2013, and he has brought with him new strategies to respond to what he calls the changing nature of science, research and government funding.

That strategy is centered on investing in two collaborative concepts: the horizontally integrated research team, or HIRT; and translational biomedical research connected to the clinic, with the goal of developing new drugs, therapies and policies – with an eye toward commercialization.

“My dream is that we’re going to take advantage of the great collaborative nature of Brown – Brown is a place where people get along with each other, where people collaborate with each other – and take advantage of the great science that there is at Brown,” Elias told ConvergenceRI.

And, he continued, by working in partnership with the clinical excellence of the Care New England and Lifespan health systems, “Become a place [of great translational science] where we really can ask and answer questions and develop new therapies.”

Here then, is the ConvergenceRI interview with Dr. Jack Elias, dean of the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University.

ConvergenceRI: Let me start with neurosciences and the new collaborative framework. How will the work being done on toxic stress by Kevin Bath and brain development fit into the translational research emphasis moving forward?
ELIAS: [looking puzzled] I am not familiar with his work. [Bath is part of a department that is not directly tied to the medical school, David Orenstein, spokesman for Brown University, who sat in on the interview, explained.]

ConvergenceRI: Let me ask the question in a broader sense. Rhode Island is becoming a hub for talent and research in neuroscience. Next week will be Brain Week. How do see the Brown Medical School’s involvement with future neuroscience research?
ELIAS: It may be better, if we did it the other way around, and talked about the vision for the medical school first, and then how neuroscience would fit in. It will make it easier for me to answer your questions, if you don’t mind.

Brown is moving forward with a renewed focus on research, and within that focus, the medical school [will] play a critical part in that plan.

We are creating a number of initiatives around new research. Let me talk a little about what it means, and the vision of the Brown medical school and how it fits in with that research agenda.

The Brown medical school is a pretty young medical school; it’s 44 years old. To give you an idea of how short that is in terms of comparison to other medical schools, my department of Internal Medicine at that medical school down the road in New Haven where I worked before I got here, when we did the historical overview [of that department], it started in 1813.

So, it’s a big difference. This is a young school.

The school was initially put together with the vision of being a community-based medical school, with a community-based and outreach-based focus.

The largest program in the medical school was called community medicine. And, it was a strong, and a very well put together program. So strong and so well put together that people realized that it would make a great underpinning to a school of public health.

And, bing bang, all of sudden it’s [the Brown] School of Public Health.

And, then the question is: you’ve just used the medical school to birth a wonderful organization in the School of Public Health. What do we want to have as a vision of health for the medical school?

The vision that I brought to the table was it’s time for us to engage in biomedical research and to engage in disease-focused translational research – to engage in what I consider to be the ultimate outreach.

And the ultimate outreach is not only to [treat] patients as we have done before, but to [treat] them with new drugs so that you actually have treatments and drugs for their diseases.

ConvergenceRI: Can you explain what you mean by that?
ELIAS: One of the most frustrating things that a practicing physician can experience is, you’re sitting there with a patient across the table, you’re writing out a prescription or a treatment plan, and you realize that you’ve been using the same treatment plan for the last 30 years, and you’ve known that 30 years ago it didn’t work very well and it still doesn’t work much better now.

That’s a really a sad situation; I would have a hard time listing all the diseases where that’s the case – where we either have nothing or what we have is so marginally effective; we’re not anywhere near to where we want to be.

My dream is that we’re going to take advantage of the great collaborative nature of Brown – Brown is a place where people get along with each other, where people collaborate with each other – and we take advantage of the great science that there is at Brown.

And, we take advantage of the great [clinical excellence] of the Care New England and Lifespan health systems.

And, we become a place [of great translational science], where we really can ask and answer questions and develop new therapies.

ConvergenceRI: How does this fit with the new strategic plan moving forward?
ELIAS: We’ve developed a strategic plan that, moving forward, is centered around two things. We have developed a new concept, called horizontally integrated research teams in education, called HIRT.

These are designed to take advantage of the fact that science is changing and the NIH is changing, and we’re moving into an era of team science. We’re moving into an era where it’s not going to be just one person, working quietly in a lab as one technician, that’s going to make the big breakthrough.

It’s going to be a team of people who look at the same question, the same problem, from different perspectives. And, the integrated research team is going to be groups of people that focus on disease, that focus on a biological mechanism or a biological pathway, or they are focused on a societal problem, such as aging or obesity.

You’ll have people who do the basic science in those areas, you’ll have people who translate that research into the clinic, and you’ll have the ability to integrate with people in the School of Public Health or the School of Engineering.

Ultimately, what you’ll be able to do is to take this out to society in the form of new therapies, new treatments or new policies. Or, you can take this out into a commercialization space and be entrepreneurial in the process.

That’s the general concept of what the programs [BITS and BBII] are going to look like. [We want to build] a scientific critical mass.

ConvergenceRI: One of the big partnerships announced in the last five years has been the $1 billion partnership that Jackson Labs created with the University of Connecticut Medical School in Farmington, Conn., focused on translation research…
ELIAS: That happened before I got here; that would have been great. I was actually in New Haven [at Yale] at the time, and they passed on the deal.

ConvergenceRI: Are there similar opportunities that you envision for such partnerships with Brown in the future that would enhance the school’s translational research opportunity?
ELIAS: That’s an important question, but let me finish [my narrative]. I’ve only given you part of the story.

First, we have created the concept of the horizontally integrated research teams.

And, we’ve also established the Brown Institute for Translational Sciences, which abbreviates to BITS.

We have [identified] areas that Brown can really excel in, as well as specific areas in which Brown is not excelling in now, but can excel in the future, and invest in those areas to become leaders.

Then, we want to hook the translational research up to a new organization that is called Brown Biomedical Innovations, Inc., or BBII.

BBII will [serve as a] proof of concept fund that we’re doing in partnership with the [Technology Ventures Office], with alumni support, to provide grants.

The dream is that people who have a research program that has gotten to the point where, with a few [more] of the most critical experiments, it can become something that can be licensed by industry, or spun out to have be its own company.

I would, love, in 10-15 years from now, to look at these windows [from my office] and see biotech firms all over this region, it would be a dream come true.

That’s the vision; we have a long list of things we are very interested in growing.

ConvergenceRI: What are the priorities?
ELIAS: One is aging. We have one of the world’s best programs in the biology of aging.

The second is respiratory diseases, which is rapidly becoming the number-one and number-two killer in the world. The third is muscular skeletal diseases – we call it muscular skeletal motion sciences.

The fourth is human genetics, genomics and personalized medicine. The fifth is biomedical informatics.

Of those five, we have already hired the leaders of the biomedical informatics program. We recruited a world-class husband-and-wife team, Liz Chen and Neil Sarkar, from the University of Vermont; they’re already here, they’ve hit the ground running.

We are also very interested in metabolic diseases and in the world of the microbiome.

We have put in a facility up at Brown where we can do very sophisticated microbiome experiments. We can compare what goes on with mice that have a microbiome and mice that don’t have a microbiome. And, you can replace the microbiome in the mice to see how growth is affected, and how their disease susceptibility is affected.

The relationship between obesity and the microbiome is another thing that we’re very interested in.

We have a lot of strengthening and a lot of growing to do, but it’s been a very exciting start.

ConvergenceRI: At the announcement of the new Hassenfeld Institute this fall, the initial three areas of focus were asthma, autism and obesity, all of which recent research has shown may have some relationship to the microbiome.
ELIAS: The Hassenfeld program, as you know, goes through both the School of Public Health and the Medical School. Another priority that’s on our list is developmental disorders.

The Hassenfeld gift fits right in with our strategic plan, focusing in part on asthma and other respiratory diseases, helping with weight and obesity; it also fits in with our interests in the microbiome.

You may or may not know that there is a really tremendous link between obesity and diseases like asthma.

When you look at what are the differences between mild asthmatics, the people who take a puffer every now and then but otherwise have a very normal life, and those people who seem to be disabled by asthma, you cannot find a single study where the BMI of the two don’t show major differences.

There appears to be some very interesting links between high BMI and having severe asthma.

ConvergenceRI: Are you familiar with the work of Brown researcher Joseph Braun and his work correlating childhood adiposity with exposure to the toxic chemical, PFOA, based upon the Cincinnati study? He just won a new $2 million award from NIH to continue his research.
ELIAS: No. [Orenstein explained that Braun was working out of the School of Public Health.]

We published a research paper that showed one of the mechanisms that gives you a type 2 immune response, which is the immune response that occurs in the airways of asthmatics, that same pathway also gives you fat accumulation.

And, we did this in genetically modified mice and in humans.

What the paper tells us, and it’s turning the field on its ears, is that the mechanisms that give you the inflammation in the airways may be the same mechanisms that actually drive the fat accumulation in adiposity.

But I didn’t think you wanted me to talk about my own research…

ConvergenceRI: And how does BIBS fit into all this?
ELIAS: You asked me earlier about how do I see BIBS fitting into this.

With the Brown Institute for Translational Sciences, we picked the areas we picked based on the things we can be great in. And, we picked the things we need to be strong in to be a really world-class place.

But the beauty [of the concept], and you can use the choice of autism in the the Hassenfeld Institute as an example, now that BITS has been established, we can build a program in anything we want to have a program in.

I’m probably one of the biggest fans of Eric Morrow, who runs the autism project. [Morrow is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and director of the Developmental Disorders Genetics Research Program at Bradley Hospital.]

Morrow was being recruited away to Yale, about a year ago, and we were able to keep him here by bending over backwards and doing everything we possiblycould; we are thrilled that he has decided to stay.

We’re really excited that he is building a tremendous program in what you would call cognition and cognitive development. It’s a very clinical program, it’s focusing on autism, and you can see how his program will fit under the Brown Institute for Translational Sciences.

In the areas that we decide we’re going to become really special in, they can have their own program in the Brown Institute for Translational Science.

ConvergenceRI: So, how does the Brown Institute for Brain Science fit into this new strategy?
ELIAS: About 80 percent to 85 percent of BIBS is in biomed. There are a few examples – the one you started out with – that are not in biomed, that are in psychology, which is called CLPS [the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Services].

The others that are not in are the people in engineering. But they are not just in BIBS, they are also in the biomedical engineering program, which is a joint program between the school of engineering and the school of medicine.

We work very closely with the people in BIBS, and the vast majority of the recruits come through us.

ConvergenceRI: There have been any number of rumors about the way in which Brown may, or may not, partner with the new proposed Wexford development, and the potential to build a new facility for statewide neurosciences research, and now, the new Brown Institute for Translational Sciences. Can you clarify the thinking about this?
ELIAS: The home of BITS is going to be in the same building as the home of BIBS. In our thinking, in our thought process, it’s called the BITS BIBS building.

The concept that is on the table now is that Wexford, a couple of blocks from here, is putting in, in stages, a significant amount of mixed used spaces, of which a significant amount of space is going to be wet lab space, in which Brown would be the major tenant for the BITS program and the BIBS program.

There is also presumably going to be an incubator space in that area for new biotech startup companies developed by BBII.

[The plan is that the researchers nurtured by BBII] will form their own companies and grow up and stay in Providence and stay in Rhode Island and help contribute to the boom of the economy that we all want to see happening here. 

ConvergenceRI: How is that conversation going?

ELIAS: It’s moving along. I can’t tell what stage it is at now.

Obviously, for this to happen, the cost of doing research in that building has to be comparable to the cost of doing research in a standard university building.

All these things are being looking into now, but there is an ongoing planning process that would move a lot of Brown’s biomedical research into the area that is literally two blocks from where we are sitting right now.

ORENSTEIN: [attempting to clarify Brown’s position] The most definitive that Brown has been able to be has been the President Paxson speech back in November to the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce.

ConvergenceRI: As you move forward, do you envision other partnerships, beyond Wexford, similar to the Jackson Labs deal with UConn, to help propel the push into translational sciences?
ELIAS: I think the more we have going on, [the better.] Providence is a very nice location for biotech, it is near Boston, but it is much less expensive to do what you need to do in Providence than what you need to do in Boston.

We have great universities, we have a wonderfully attractive place for future companies that want to relocate, for spinoffs, for biotech to flourish in this area.

ConvergenceRI: Can you talk about the nature of collaboration, moving forward?
ELIAS: Let me give you a different plan on that. One of the things I realized when I got here was that the basic scientists were not interacting in any kind of significant way with other colleagues.

I am a firm believer – and as part of this, and part of our horizontally integrated research team concept – is that you’ve got to have people who come from different places all working together on the same projects and problems.

You can really make progress when there is a heterogeneous perspective.

[When I arrived at Brown], one of the first things that I did was that I used some of the money that was offered in my startup package to launch a series of grants.

To get the grants, what you had to do was have one lead investigator who came from a basic science and one leading investigator who came from one of the clinical departments.

And then they had to show that when they came together, that they could do something that neither of them could do by themselves.

We’re now in year three of that process. Basically, we said, form a team, a team that has both the clinical and basic science perspective, and you’ve given them the seed money.

We’re at the point where a lot of the teams’ work is going to the NIH and has now been funded. It’s exciting to see the return on investment. on the [initial] investment that we’ve [made], to move this along.

ConvergenceRI: One of the people within this evolving translational research ecosystem is Dr. Jim Padbury? Is he part of the new tram structure that you’ve been working to develop?
ELIAS: Jim is part of a group that we’ve established, called BIRDS, the Brown Investigative Researchers for Respiratory Diseases. He’s playing a major role in that.

I think so highly of Jim Padbury that I made him the head of our $20 million CPR [Center for Pediatric Research] grant application, it’s down at NIH right now, and we’re waiting to hear.

The grant got a good evaluation from the study section, and we’re simply waiting for the federal government to get their act together and realize that they don’t want to make us write it one more time.

ConvergenceRI: What haven’t I asked, that I should have asked, that you’d like to talk about?
ELIAS: Have we seen any success so far? The answer is yes. Grants in biomed at Brown are up more than 50 percent in the last three years.

I don’t know any other place in the U.S. that has had that kind of success in the last period of time.