The University of California, Irvine, is looking to develop a full-fledged biomedical engineering department to go along with its 3-year-old research and teaching center. To do so, the university plans to reach out to Orange County’s extensive medical technology industry.
“I visualize this department to play a key role in the economy of Orange County and the state in biotechnology and biomedical devices,” said Nicolaos Alexopoulos, dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UCI. “If you have a very powerful department, you really enhance the economy of the local region. Your graduates will not only be hired by existing companies, but they will also create new companies, therefore (improving) employment in the region.”
UCI’s efforts to work with OC’s medical device industry are taking a variety of forms, from working with local companies on program development to fund raising. William Link, a managing director at the Newport Beach office of venture capital firm Versant Ventures, and wife Marsha, are giving $1.5 million to the university to fund a biomedical engineering chair.
Linking UCI and OC’s large biomedical industry “gives the dean more resources and a local market to be served by the university,” Link said.
Besides the endowment, Link also is getting involved in raising fellowship money from the local biomedical industry.
“My whole career has been in medical device companies, where I’ve seen the power (that) biomedical engineers can bring to solve medical problems,” Link said.
The venture capitalist’s background is one of founding and selling medical device companies, including one to Allergan Inc., the Irvine-based drug maker (see related story, page 3).
UCI has put together an advisory board of local medical device and pharmaceutical companies for guidance in the development of its biomedical department, according to Dr. Steven George, the Center for Biomedical Engineering’s director. Link is the group’s chairman; members come from large and small medical technology companies and professional service providers.
Two examples of companies that have contributed financially and have advisory board members are Edwards Lifesciences Corp., the Irvine-based heart valve maker, and Allergan.
“One thing we really try to describe to them was being on the board is where you have influence over the training programs, which really are brand new,” George said. “The structure of them, what type of biomedical engineers we’re training is really a blank slate. So it’s a great opportunity for them to influence the type of potential employees at a very local level.”
Device companies say they are supportive of UCI’s efforts.
“The one thing that we have lacked is a world-class program in biomedical engineering,” said Stu Foster, an advisory board member and Edwards’ corporate vice president of technology and discovery.
By contrast, Bay area medical device companies have been able to feed off biomedical engineering programs at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, Foster said. Biomedical engineering brings research that could be spun off for commercial purposes, he said.
“Having a school in the county is a valuable tool for us,” said Robert Stoy, vice president of product development for Fullerton-based Beckman Coulter Inc., a biomedical testing company. “There’s a need for people at all levels, undergraduate and graduate.”
Stoy, also a member of the UCI board, noted that biomedical engineers tend to have skills that span many parts of the medical diagnostics industry.
UCI’s efforts go beyond curriculum development. Alexopoulos said he also is looking to start a fund-raising campaign for a building within the medical school complex that will house the biomedical engineering department, along with cardiology and ophthalmology. Much device activity is related to those two areas.
“First of all, we need to create a building,” Alexopoulos said. “Secondly, we need to create endowments in order to attract the best graduate students and faculty, the best minds we can find.”
Alexopoulos is planning to work with Dr. Thomas Cesario, the College of Medicine’s dean, to locate individuals willing to participate in an endowment fund, as well as with the overall biomedical engineering concept.
Such efforts include developing a joint medical degree and doctorate program to train biomedical engineers, Alexopoulos said.
“The engineer has to work with one of the most sophisticated machines, perhaps, in the universe, which is a human being alive,” he said. “And in my opinion, you cannot separate the engineer from the College of Medicine from that perspective. On the other hand, you cannot separate the engineer from the School of Engineering.”
Alexopoulos points to George’s background as an example of the cross-pollination he’s looking to foster. George holds both a medical degree and a doctorate in chemical engineering.
“He is the type of individual we want to be educating in the future,” the dean said.
Besides the School of Engineering and College of Medicine, UCI’s biomedical engineering center combines research and teaching activities of the schools of biological sciences and physical sciences and the Department of Information and Computer Science.
UCI established its biomedical engineering center in 1998, after the university won a $3 million development award from the Whitaker Foundation of Arlington, Va. Whitaker’s grant, one of only 16 awarded since 1989, provides support for equipment, renovations, salaries, scholarships and fellowships through 2003.
The university eventually hired five biomedical engineering faculty members. A graduate concentration and undergraduate major in biomedical engineering started in 1999. Plans are to hire five new faculty positions at the end of July, according to Alexopoulos.
“One of the reasons I took the position here at Irvine was because I could visualize the possibility of creating a biomedical engineering component because in truth, there was none,” said Alexopoulos, who became the engineering school’s dean four years ago, after coming from the University of California, Los Angeles.
George, who came to UCI in 1995, said, “It seemed to even a young, na & #271;ve faculty member like myself, if you glance around Orange County, you see a major void (on campus) because Orange County has a very strong biomedical device community. It certainly seemed to have a lot of potential to develop biomedical engineering as an academic discipline.” n
