UM Eyes Research Spot By Scripps

By Nirvi Shah

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Saturday, November 29, 2003

MIAMI -- The University of Miami plans to open a research clinic in Palm Beach County to strengthen its ties to The Scripps Research Institute, according to a top UM medical school administrator.

Scripps President Richard Lerner visited the university Monday. Afterward, Dr. Leo Twiggs, an associate dean of UM's medical school, said the university wants to build the clinic next to the branch of its Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Palm Beach Gardens, a short trip from Scripps' proposed north county campus at Mecca Farms.

At the clinic, UM has hopes of turning Scripps research into real medical treatments for patients. "We're especially looking at research that is translational -- applying to real clinical situations," Twiggs said.

Assistant UM Provost Gary Margulies, who is on the board of BioFlorida, a consortium of biotechnology companies, said a UM clinic would be a perfect fit with Scripps in Palm Beach County.

"We have a very large population of elderly people, Hispanics, Haitians, the HIV positive -- every kind of cultural variation," Margulies said. "Between the university and Jackson Memorial Hospital, we have enormous clinical trial capabilities." Palm Beach County, which will contribute up to $200 million to Scripps for land and buildings, plans to set aside space on Scripps' campus for universities and other schools that want to be near Scripps.

The county's flagship public university, Florida Atlantic, hopes to capitalize on Scripps' presence, in part because of its hometown advantage. Although it appears that FAU's campus in Jupiter will become Scripps' temporary base in Palm Beach County, the university's research programs are still developing compared with those at UM. FAU's research spending is about one-fifth that of UM's.

UM also has a strong connection to Scripps. Dr. Camillo Ricordi, who runs UM's Diabetes Research Institute, met Dr. Daniel R. Salomon of Scripps as the result of a National Institutes of Health initiative targeting diabetes research. Two years ago, the NIH asked UM and nine other research centers across the country to work on the advancement of islet cell research.

In patients with Type 1 diabetes, the immune system destroys islet cells, which release the insulin necessary to keep the body's sugar levels up. Scripps and UM are working together to perfect the shipping of delicate pancreas organs and the pancreatic islet cells. UM and Scripps researchers hope to expound on that research once Scripps arrives in Florida.

Now, Scripps ships donated organs to Ricordi, who in return ships extracted islet cells to Scripps in California. After the cells arrive in California, Scripps doctors transplant them into patients. Scripps is testing a variety of methods to do so, Salomon said.

Ricordi extracts clusters of these tiny cells from a healthy donated pancreas. All together, they appear to be just a few drops of liquid and compose only about 2 percent of the pancreas. Once extracted, they are injected into a vein that travels to a diabetic person's liver.

"So the liver does the job of both the pancreas and the liver," Ricordi said. "Instead of doing an organ transplant, it's a cellular transplant."

The process is much less complex than an organ transplant, and it doesn't require finding a donor who is a perfect or near-perfect match as organ transplants do.

"Camillo and I had decided we were going to go forward with our human islet program, the shipping program," Salomon said, "and then in the middle of all that we found this whole plan to have the Scripps Institute in Florida."

Salomon is not moving to Florida, but Scripps' presence here opens an array of options for his existing research, he said.

Here, Scripps researchers could test drugs that enhance the shipping of islet cells. Some of the islets Ricordi is sending to California could be shipped to Palm Beach County instead for transplants into patients here.

Ricordi believes the benefit will stretch well beyond his work.

"What has happened so far is that most of our inventions or discoveries have been flowing out of the state," he said. "There is a huge intellectual treasure already, but if you add now another major institution, it's conducive to developing its true potential."

Ricordi's collaborations with Scripps are among many at UM. Dr. Louis Elsas, a medical geneticist, works with Scripps in the science of proteomics -- isolating proteins from DNA, which is the code that defines each human being, making crystals of the proteins, then taking 3-D pictures of them.

The research is aimed at isolating damaged proteins that cause genetic defects, Elsas said. At UM, researchers isolate the proteins then inject them into bacteria that reproduce the proteins. Then scientists build the crystals of those proteins. The crystals are shipped to Scripps, where special lasers are used to take pictures of the proteins. Scripps builds 3-D models based on those pictures. If a mutation appears, the model is compared with that of a normal gene.

"Once you know that, you can figure out how to replace that molecule to make gene function normal," Elsas said.

Elsas recently joined UM from Emory University in Atlanta but has been working with Scripps for a decade. He also has plans for Scripps' arrival in Palm Beach County. He said it will be much easier to work with the institution once it is only 90 miles away.

"We'll exchange grad students, work in each others' laboratories and exchange methods," he said.

Exchanges like this can be invaluable, as the close ties with Scripps proved with the University of California-San Diego, said Dr. Paul Sanberg, an associate dean at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Sanberg directs the university's center of aging and brain repair.

Although University of California-San Diego students don't work at Scripps, some of their professors do, and the two institutions collaborate on research projects. And Scripps' presence has built a village of pharmaceutical companies and other research institutions.

"San Diego has a very strong biotech industry," Sanberg said. "The University of California-San Diego medical school is about the same age (as USF's) yet they have grown so fast and grown so well because of the research infrastructure."

Copyright © 2003 The Palm Beach Post.

This article posted December 31, 2003.