Health research: Cure for economy?

By Ben Sutherly

The Columbus Dispatch Monday May 7, 2012 5:23 AM

Dr. Michael Grever, chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at Ohio State University, gives a tour of the cancer research laboratories on the eighth floor of the Biomedical Research Tower at OSU.

Ohios health-care sector increasingly sees medical research as a way to help heal not only patients but the states economy.

To that end, economic-development officials and researchers say deriving more tangible results from the hundreds of millions of health-research dollars that flow through the states academic centers and hospitals is essential.

This is a very important economic driver for the state, said Mitch Horowitz, vice president and managing director of Columbus-based Battelles Technology Partnership Practice. The state already has 37,000 nonclinical jobs in health-care manufacturing, research and distribution, but the industry is not as fully specialized as it is in other states, leaving room for more potential high-paying jobs, Horowitz said.

In 2011, more than $710 million in federal funding from the National Institutes of Health flowed to Ohio. The state ranked 10th in the nation last year in NIH funding, a closely watched metric in academic, business and political circles.In 2008, $678 million in NIH funding came into Ohio.

Dr. Charles Lockwood, dean of Ohio State Universitys College of Medicine, called those federal dollars fresh money that have a multiplier effect as they circulate in the local economy. He said Ohio States Wexner Medical Center and Nationwide Childrens Hospital together pump more than $300 million annually into the central Ohio economy as a result of NIH funding alone.

The state must do a better job of commercializing the academic research funded by those and other dollars, officials and academic leaders said.

Little of that (money) is leveraged well, said Tony Dennis, president and CEO of BioOhio, a nonprofit that promotes bioscience industries.

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Health research: Cure for economy?

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