New Michelson Center to foster collaboration

Tucked against the northwest corner of campus, the Temporary Research Facility — a cluster of brown trailers interspersed with patches of artificial grass and tables and lawn chairs — is a modest place for the next scientific breakthrough. Past the facility’s gates, movie posters, abstract paintings and anatomical sketches by Leonardo Da Vinci adorn the building’s walls.

Here, art and science meet with a purpose.

Inside one of the structures, a quote written on the wall just outside the office of Steve Kay, outgoing dean of the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, reads, “The Bridge@USC is the foundry where solutions to complex health challenges are forged.”

The words relate an optimistic prophecy for the new Bridge Institute, a research hub that will soon replace the current interim workspace. It will be located in the Michelson Center for Convergent Biosciences and merges the fields of physics, chemistry, biology and digital arts in order to better understand the human body.

Though it will be another two years before the Michelson Center is completed — whose laboratories will be filled by 24 principal investigators from different fields and backgrounds — research at the Bridge Institute is already underway. The group, wrote Robert Perkins in USC Dornsife Magazine, has published six high-profile papers in the last seven months.

Sitting together in a conference room, biochemist Raymond Stevens and physicists Peter Kuhn and Scott Fraser shared their vision for the Bridge Institute.

“So you’re talking to a physicist, a physicist and a chemist — all trying to play biology,” said Stevens, who researches G protein-coupled receptors, the gatekeepers and messengers of the cell.

Fraser, whose research focuses on imaging and molecular analyses of biological systems, reflected on the frontier nature of the endeavor.

“There’s something fun about being a newcomer,” Fraser said. “You don’t know the things that are wrong.”

“One of the visions of the Michelson Building is to be a nexus that brings together all these different groups,” Stevens said. “One of the things that is very important these days is collisions — people running into each other and talking to each other.”

Expressing their vision of a new approach to biological systems, the group drew parallels with Bell Laboratories, the research and development wing of AT&T responsible for the digital communications technology used today. The team hopes they can incorporate the elements of convergence and connectivity seen there into their work.

“Bell Laboratories was created with a dream, a vision to connect each other together, to connect the world,” Stevens said. “What we want to do is to connect the human body.”

The hope of the Institute, the “bridge” linking various subjects, is that by bringing together scientists of disparate fields, a new paradigm of thinking will emerge, one that will conquer the greatest challenge of all — life itself.

For years, clinicians have realized that each patient responds differently to the same drug. This understanding of individualized care ushered in a new era of personalized medicine, where doctors tailor treatment strategies to the individual, rather than treat every patient the same way. Major pharmaceutical companies, however, still fail to recognize the patient as an individual during drug development, resulting in serious losses, both in finances and in lives.

“The success rate in drug discovery is one in 5,000,” Stevens said. “The cost to develop a drug today is $1.2 billion. This is the latest report, and most of that is failure data. In biology, because we don’t understand the system, we’re successful 5 percent of the time. Our knowledge, our understanding of the human body is just not there yet.”

By interpreting the human body as a system, researchers at the Bridge Institute will be able to understand how a drug unfolds within a complex architecture that is unique for each patient. Peter Kuhn, a leading oncologist who invented a method for screening cancer cells with only a sample of blood, elaborated on this paradigm shift. “We have to think differently when we are trying to assess the entire human body and how the human body will respond to certain interventions,” Kuhn said.

Now, new apps and gadgets are enabling people to monitor their risk for a disease and track how their disease is changing over time.

“Science,” Kuhn said, “is the information that is provided to you as an individual to help you understand how to manipulate the disease as opposed to the disease manipulating you.”

With the wealth of data amassed by devices and the infinitude of information accessible through the internet, synthesizing all the relevant information for the treatment of disease can be a frightening task. That’s where the Michelson Center comes in.

Along with finding new pathways through the interconnectedness of diverse fields, the researchers at the Bridge Institute have the responsibility to encourage the next wave of scientists, engineers and designers.

“Our job is to create the next generation of students that frighten traditionally thinking people,” Fraser said. “They’re not going to see boundaries. They need to master a physical concept or an engineering concept to tackle a problem. I think they’re be fearless about doing so.”

As a research center, the Michelson building will offer post-docs, graduate students and undergraduates the opportunity to engage in a laboratory setting and learn a new method of problem solving.

“What we as a faculty need to do is create an environment that doesn’t inhibit creativity — that instead fosters creativity,” Stevens said.

Though the city produces more than 5,000 graduates in science, engineering and technology every year, more than San Diego and San Francisco combined, Los Angeles still trails behind in the biotech industry. A report published last year by FierceBiotech ranked the city 14th for biotech venture funding, and a 2014 report by Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News ranked Los Angeles ninth in U.S. biopharma clusters. Stevens attributes these rankings to the city’s failure to attract innovators in biotechnology.

“There’s no place for [students] to go right now if they stayed in Los Angeles,” he said. “The city of Los Angeles needs to become more helpful for the start-up of biotech companies. That’s one ingredient that’s needed.”

The Michelson Center is striving to change that, and it’s hoping to garner enough manpower to do so.

“You need the people [and] the feeder, that’s going to occupy these biotech incubators. It’s all about the biotech ecosystem and nurturing that,” Stevens said.

And while the promises of transforming the greater Los Angeles and creating the next generation of convergent thinkers are far off, the group is confident their dream will be fulfilled.

“There’s an opportunity with convergence of being purposeful,” Kuhn said. “It’s about doing science in the context of whether it’s a disease or some other function of living organisms. You’re doing science out in the open. You’re doing it out in the rest of the world.”