BICOEE Brain Imaging Center of Economic Excellence

Vision

We are creating a world-class brain imaging center and industrial cluster spanning MUSC and USC. The center would draw on the unique resources of each school, and use lottery monies to compliment and unite nascent expertise. This statewide center of excellence would facilitate research within and between MUSC and USC. This process of collaboration has begun, with USC and MUSC brain scientists already starting to compete together nationally - one $1.6 million and one $10.5 million collaborative grant are under review by NIH. Creating a unified center would cement and expand this collaboration. By bridging together the complimentary expertise in our two universities, we would create a research center in brain imaging that can provide all the expertise for multi-million dollar federal grants and contracts. The Brain Imaging Center of Economic Excellence (BICOEE), having the complete panoply of neuroscience expertise, would be far more attractive to our existing and planned industry partners. The BICOEE would have the critical mass needed to be the research engine at the center of a technology cluster. The synergy between the university center and the industry partners will lead to technological developments in the a number of industries including medical device manufacturers, MRI hardware technology, software development and other high-tech and knowledge-based industries. These areas of the healthcare industry are expected to boom in the near future, and could provide significant economic growth to the State of South Carolina.

Future brain imaging research dollars for health and for defense department questions will increasingly gravitate to consortia that offer all the large number of different types of expertise needed to tackle these complex questions. It is becoming unrealistic to expect a single university, even large wealthy ones, to be able to sustain all the diverse experts that are increasingly needed. For the large cities of the Northeast and the West Coast, this is not a problem - nearby universities are collaborating to attract federal and industry funding (Stanford and UCSF - Harvard and MIT - even UNC and Duke). If South Carolina does not put a consortium of this type together, we will simply be unable to compete in this most important arena. As the many world class researchers that we do have in South Carolina face the frustrations of being unable to attract large grants - due to our inability to offer competitive one-stop shopping, it is almost inevitable that universities in other states will cherry-pick the key players, removing them from SC. This is a key time for the technology and science of the brain in South Carolina - it is a time of great opportunity, but also a time of considerable risk.