UH center to lose federal financing

By John Duchemin
Advertiser Staff Writer

The federal government plans to end financing for a University of Hawai'i research institute, the Marine Biosciences Engineering Center, after the center went through several leadership changes and struggled to meet its goal of collaborating with private biotech companies on lucrative research projects.

The National Science Foundation will stop payments to the $2.7 million-a-year UH center, known as Marbec, on Oct. 31, 2003. It will reduce spending by about one-third for the next 18 months.

Marbec will have to survive on other government or private sources when the NSF money runs out, and also will have to reduce the number of research projects it can finance, said Charles Kinoshita, Marbec's interim director, who took over after the resignation of Alexander Malahoff last fall.

UH officials said an NSF review team that visited in February was concerned over the Marbec leadership change — one of the main reasons they chose to cut spending instead of extending the initial five-year Marbec contract, which began in 1998, for another five years.

But UH officials said yesterday that the program deserves continued support, and that the university will do what it can to nurture Marbec as it searches for other sources of financing.

"Marbec has more significance to us than being 'just another research center,' " said Edward Laws, interim vice chancellor for research and graduate education at UH. "The vision is for it to do a lot of collaborative work with the private sector, and that's the kind of thing we want to see more of."

Laws, a former Marbec researcher, said UH will move Marbec into newly renovated offices and keep looking for professors to fill several new Marbec-financed faculty positions.

Hawai'i biotechnology backers and UH and state government officials hailed Marbec at its founding as a tool to draw research money to UH while stimulating the local biotech industry.

A joint project of UH with the University of California-Berkeley, the center has drawn the participation of about 20 professors, has financed about 20 projects per year, and has attracted seven partner companies in Hawai'i, the Mainland and Canada.

But Laws said Marbec has attracted much less private money than imagined — about $10,000 to $15,000 per year, according to Laws.

The center also drew some criticism from the National Science Foundation when it struggled to find its focus, said Kevin Kelly, Marbec's director of business development.

"It was a new way of working — faculty members from different departments and schools, working together to solve bits of complex problems, with an overall strategy behind it all," Kelly said. "But we didn't do that good a job in defining the strategy, what roles people were to play in it. And we never developed a system to track projects and make sure we got results."

The center went through two directors — Oskar R. Zaborsky and Malahoff — before UH appointed Kinoshita last fall.

Since then, Laws and Kelly said, Marbec has improved its processes.