UCI Revives Plan for Health Sciences Center : Research: The university says the proposed $450-million complex would be a link to a planned biomedical industrial park the school hopes to develop with major medical and pharmaceutical companies.

The dream is still alive.

After years of skirmishes known as the “hospital wars” in the early 1970s and 1980s, and admonishments by the UC Board of Regents to drop all plans for a campus hospital, UC Irvine is resurrecting a plan that would have everything--the latest in basic and medical research labs and clinics. But there would be no hospital beds, only outpatient clinics.

UCI Chancellor Jack W. Peltason and medical college dean Dr. Walter Henry have recently begun shopping a proposed Center for Health Sciences around to prominent Orange County business and community leaders. And while the $450-million center has a long way to go before it is approved by the faculty, UC regents or anyone else, Peltason and Henry hope to raise interest in and begin collecting seed money for what is envisioned as a West Coast replica of the National Institutes of Health.

UCI is pitching the health sciences center as a synergistic link to a planned biomedical industrial park the university hopes to develop with major medical and pharmaceutical companies on its western edge. The arrangement would not be unlike the relationship between Stanford University and the computer and electronics industry that created Silicon Valley in Northern California.

If they can get both going in these tough financial times, UCI officials even suggest that the dual projects could propel Orange County out of the worst economic downturn since World War II.

“This could be the engine to recover from the recession,” said Peltason, who will leave UCI to become president of the UC system on Oct. 1.

“California, and in particular this area, is losing the defense industry. And other (businesses) are down,” Peltason said. ‘It’s quite clear to me that the economic buildup is going to be in the new industries--biomedical and communications. That is going to be the engine of growth for the future.”

UCI’s goal is to build excellence in biomedical research and to provide better schooling and more access to basic research for its doctors in training. But it will need hefty financing to do so--about a third from grants, a third from investors and a third from private donors. No one is banking on state funding for such a project.

While most on campus familiar with the project support the idea of a research complex, some say the price tag makes this a pipe dream that cannot be realized.

“The idea that you’re going to be building a mega research center of this scope in 25 years . . . is to me, let’s say, rather optimistic,” said one UCI scientist who asked not to be identified. “All developments are based on dreams, and I would hope there is sufficient evidence that these dreams have some possibility of being realized in the time scale planned. . . . But this, to me, is a sort of a reverse ‘Field of Dreams’--that if you dream it, it will be built.”

Another longtime campus scientist said a research complex is as vital now for the medical school as it was when a campus research hospital was proposed in the early 1970s and 1980s. But it is overly optimistic to assume companies will flock to the research and development park or that major donors will pump the requisite dollars into the health sciences center, he said.

“Funding is the major obstacle, and I don’t know of any model that exists out there that would suggest this project will be successful,” the faculty member said.

Peltason knows there are doubting Thomases within and without the university walls. But he contends that there are important reasons to move now on these projects.

“Here is a unique opportunity, and I think one of the most exciting things to be happening in California, maybe in the United States,” he said.

“You don’t often find a major university with 200 acres next door to it, located (near the) Pacific Ocean, right next door to Mexico,” the chancellor said. “Although this is going to take 20 years, it’s important to get going now because these industries, if we wait, may locate elsewhere in the United States.”

But what will the center, if it is built, mean for UCI’s stewardship of its medical center in Orange, where the bulk of Orange County’s indigent are treated?

Let there be no doubt, says Henry, a cardiologist and current dean of the medical school who is shepherding the center project. “We have as our clinical teaching hospital UCI Medical Center and we have no intention of changing that,” Henry said.

Still, it was an issue raised repeatedly when the university pursued earlier efforts to build a campus hospital.

“Some of the advocates for the indigent were worried about that before,” said Dr. Stanley van den Noort, a UCI neurologist who was dean of the medical college and the leading proponent of the earlier campus research hospital projects.

Van den Noort said UCI never planned to pull out of the medical center, which has been a chronic financial problem for the university because of the high numbers of uninsured patients.

That issue, he said, was a sideline, a red herring really, in a battle between community interests that wanted a local hospital in the city of Irvine and competing hospitals that saw a campus research hospital as a magnet that would lure away their top physicians.

“I was the chief gunslinger, but all I accomplished was to prevent the community from building a hospital next to the campus. That was 1974,” van den Noort said.

The revival of the plan in the early 1980s became “another generation of the same battle.”

The university lost. The community won, getting what is now the Irvine Medical Center.

Van den Noort, who strongly supports the proposed center, agreed that there could be renewed concern that UCI would back away from its medical center.

“It could come up again, but I don’t see why,” he said.

Chauncey Alexander, former chairman of the United Way Health Care Task Force in Orange County, was not familiar with the planned project. But he said it is unlikely that there would be any change in UCI’s operation of the medical center.

“I don’t think the community is going to let (UCI officials) back off from it,” said Alexander, a Cal State Long Beach professor. “I know the health care task force of the United Way is strongly in support of maintaining that center.”

It is too early to say how the county’s physicians will view the health sciences center.

“If it deflects the medical school from training primary care physicians . . . it would not be well received,” said Dr. Terence Maloy, president of the Orange County Medical Assn., which has 2,600 physicians as members.

“But as long as it does not, I can’t see there would be significant opposition at the OCMA level,” added Maloy, a dermatologist and a clinical professor at UCI.

As envisioned in a scale model in Walter Henry’s office, the proposed Center for Health Sciences would be located next to existing medical research buildings, as well as the Beckman Laser Institute and the Joan Irvine Smith Hall, formerly a research building on campus occupied by a private biomedical firm.

Initial plans call for five institutes bringing together scientists in the fields of neurosciences, cancer, molecular genetics, cell development and aging, and cardiovascular research. Each building would be about five stories high.

Henry said he hopes to break ground on a neurosciences research facility by 1994. The university already has applied to an undisclosed foundation for $10 million toward construction. He is seeking an additional $5-million grant to equip the facility and hopes to borrow the last $10 million for construction.

“Of course this is all contingent on approval of the faculty and, of course, the regents,” he said. “There’s a lot of homework we have to do.”

Henry said Peltason and he decided to approach community and business leaders with the plan this summer after he was contacted by representatives of biotechnology firms that had heard of the proposed center and research park and expressed interest.

“We felt it was important to send a signal out to these companies that we were serious in terms of our planning,” Henry said.

The center would have other buildings devoted to clinical research and technology transfer and outpatient services. Some lab space would be available for lease to private companies, and they would also have access to UCI’s computer network, library databases and other services.

“This will speed up the process of bringing new discoveries from the lab bench to bedside,” Henry said.

So far, the proposal has not been presented to the Academic Senate. This prompted concern from some faculty members, particularly after they learned that the scale model of the facility was on public display for three weeks recently at the Crystal Court mall in Costa Mesa.

While many do support the general concept, some predicted a renewed debate over whether such collaborations with private companies will impinge on academic freedom. Special procedures to protect academic freedom were put in place when the university allowed Hitachi Corp. to build a campus research laboratory, where UCI scientists work on some floors and company scientists on others. But concerns linger among some faculty.

“Most of that is nonsense,” said van den Noort, noting that university scientists have worked with industry for decades. “The number of cases in which industry has stolen from a university is trivial. The number of instances in which a university has taken money from industry and promised to do something then not done it is considerably higher.”

Dr. Albert L. Nichols, president of the Nichols Institute in San Juan Capistrano, knows firsthand about collaborative relationships between private industry and academics. The private institute was specifically designed to bring academic researchers into contact with private laboratories as a way of speeding development of biomedical tests and technology.

“There is always a potential for conflict of interest no matter where you decide to put a boundary,” said Nichols, an endocrinologist by training. “The first concern is, does the academician have the opportunity to follow his or her own lights without interference. The second is, does being involved with a business entity present any interference with that freedom.

“I don’t know that being involved in this kind of setting either increases or decreases chance of this,” said Nichols, who is a member of the UCI College of Medicine’s advisory board of trustees.

“I personally have the bias that the more people work together and understand each other’s issues, the better the chances of resolving them are,” he said. “And what I have seen is a new kind of expertise in just getting the job done.”

Nichols is a supporter of the proposed center but he, like other business officials interviewed, is cautious.

“I don’t want to be overly optimistic,” he said. “It will take time for people to understand how it works, and it will evolve gradually.

“But my thought is, that over time, this will become an excellent attracter for biotechnology companies. And that is going to have significant community impact,” Nichols said. “It will attract very excellent people to the university, and secondly, it will provide for many business spinoffs.”

“It’s not going to happen overnight,” added H.D. Thoreau, a principal with Cruttenden & Co., an investment banking firm in Irvine. “But this sort of thing has been very successful in the neighborhood of places like (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Stanford, and more recently, the UC San Diego area. . . .

“I’m very interested in (the proposed health sciences center) because it makes sense. There are new (biotechnology) developments and inventions happening all the time. . . . Goodness knows that field is going to keep growing. We still have plenty of diseases that haven’t been solved yet.”

James McCamant, publisher of the Medical Technology Stock Letter, a Berkeley-based newsletter to investors in the field of medical technology, predicted the center and adjacent R&D; park will have greatest appeal to young companies just starting out.

“They like to be around other resources,” he explained. “Virtually all the companies I track have relationships with a university, and in some cases, a half-dozen universities. . . . I’m in favor of these kinds of projects, but you have to be a little careful about not expecting too much, too quickly.”

Dick Sim, executive vice president for the Irvine Co., said he and Peltason discussed the proposed research park a few years ago and agreed to explore the market potential for such an idea. A study commissioned by the firm calculated that there were 1,200 health care-related companies locally and that they represented the second largest industry in the county behind development.

“If you are looking for an industry that has the potential for growth in the ‘90s to replace and re-employ the people being displaced in defense industries, biomedical and biotechnology is it,” said Sim, whose firm owns a 70-acre parcel next to UCI’s proposed research park. The Irvine Co. land is also slated for additional research and development.

Peltason said industry and community leaders who have seen the proposals have been “excited, positive and supportive,” though none has offered any donations or sought to relocate in the industrial park.

“They don’t underestimate the complexities and the difficulties; it’s a big project. But it has major payoffs,” he said.

This protracted period of recession may seem an inopportune time to shop around a project worth nearly half a billion dollars. But Peltason said it is important to be ready when the recovery comes.

“You build a university for the centuries, through the decades,” he said. “But it’s now timely to do this: Our medical school is getting a critical mass, and in basic science, we have one of the strongest neurosciences departments in the Western World. A lot of things seem to be coming into play.”

In the end, the idea of bringing basic researchers together with physicians who work to cure disease is the reason to build it.

“If you look at the evolution of the medical school--in Germany, England, even Johns Hopkins University (in Maryland)--over the last 300 years, the great advantage has been to put the people working with patients cheek to jowl with people doing basic research,” van den Noort said. “That interaction produces change and progress. That’s what it’s all about.”

Proposed Science Complex

Some features of the center, which would occupy 110 acres near the western edge of campus, include:

* Five institutes with scientists in the fields of neuroscience, cancer, molecular genetics, cell development and aging, and cardiovascular research at a cost of about $450 million.

* Two clinical research buildings, two technology transfer centers, with laboratories and other space available for lease to private companies.

* Outpatient facilities close to the centers of basic research in biotechnology. Medical school students and residents would still work at the university’s teaching hospital, UCI Medical Center in Orange.

Source: UC Irvine