AKRON, Ohio — Frank L. Douglas was living a comfortable life as a senior fellow at the Ewing M. Kauffman Foundation; senior partner of Puretech Ventures and chief scientific adviser of Bayer Healthcare. Yes, Douglas held all three positions at the same time.
And then an executive search firm tapped him on the shoulder. Now, Douglas, a 24-year veteran of the health care, pharmaceutical research and biotechnology industries who has held positions like executive vice president and chief scientific officer at companies including Aventis Pharma AG, is on his way to Akron.
On Sept. 1, the British Guyana native who has an undergraduate degree from Lehigh University, and Ph.D. and M.D. degrees from Cornell University will become the first president and chief executive of the BioInnovation Institute in Akron. The institute is an emerging research institute that aims at becoming a full-fledged academic health center, initially building on orthopedic and materials expertise in the Akron area.
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His new role may seem a little familiar to Douglas, who launched Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Center of Biomedical Innovation in 2005 “to bring major players from business, government and academia together to work to transform the [pharmaceutical] industry,” according to MIT. He directed the center until 2007 when he resigned his professorship and center directorship to protest the university administration’s refusal to consider granting fellow African-American scientist James Sherley tenure, according to the Boston Globe.
Douglas, who has won numerous industry awards and directs several companies, did a telephone interview from Zurich, Switzerland with MedCity News about his Akron appointment.
Q. What attracted you to Akron?
A. I was approached by [executive search firm] Heidrick & Struggles. I will tell you, the first time they approached me, I basically said, ‘not interested. I’ve been there, done that.’ They called again. I started off saying ‘no,’ then I finally said, ‘you know, the truth of the matter is, I don’t even know what I am saying no to. Why don’t you send me some materials?’ And so they did, and I read it, and I thought, this seems interesting, let me check it out.
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Q. So you spent a day with the leaders of the five institutions that formed the institute and the operating team that has worked to create it? What did you think then?
A. I left that day very impressed with the commonness of goal and purpose of these leaders.
Q. What really clinched the Akron institute for you?
A. What really did it was a follow up, three-and-a-half day visit I had in which I met individually and in groups with over 60 individuals who have been working in cross-institutional teams to set up the operations of these five centers [within the institute]. As I told colleagues of mine, it’s one thing to … see five leaders come together, to see the interest of the city and state, but it is more impressive when you see the guys who actually will have to day-to-day get things done, so committed to this vision that they’ve been working together for eight-to-10 months. That I found really compelling.
And then when you step back and you look at this … experiment in the medical and social transformation of a region, and you see the public, the institutions, the private and philanthropy all coming together with this common goal of improving the health and economic well-being of a region, it is unparalleled. And I have referred to it as the Mount Everest of social and medical transformation.
Q. How would you describe the development model that’s emerging from the Akron institute?
A. We clearly have a center that is like the research-generation engine. Then you have the centers like the device development center, and like the clinical trial center, which are development/commercialization-type centers. And then you have the training and simulation center, and the [community outreach] to the medically under-served, centers where we’re delivering and disseminating, via education and treatment, the things that are coming out of these centers. So we have here a real model, going from idea to the patient, and disseminating through education and commercialization. It is really very powerful.
Q. Why is this development model so compelling to you?
A. It is badly needed because many of the present models, as we talk about the lack of productivity in the bio-pharm industry, many of the present models really are not working as well, they’re not as productive as they were at one time, but they no longer are because the issues are much more complex. So getting together talent and expertise from many different players and stakeholders is extremely important, and that is what I found really very persuasive.
Q. What is the main challenge you and other institute leaders likely will face in coming years?
A. My sense that a greater challenge might very well be the culture of moving from idea to commercialization as rapidly as possible. That’s always a challenge in academic, hospital settings where the goal has been to educate or to deliver service to the patient. Suddenly, the goal is this idea — before I run off and publish it — I need to look at the [intellectual property] possibility if we can form a company around it.
