Dot.com mania came and went. Telecoms tanked. But bioscience is big and getting bigger. It seems like every region wants a slice of this action. Can a region, with moxie and money, vault from “nowhere” to near the top of the pack?
Kansas City may be proving it’s possible. It surely qualifies as a late starter. It lacks a prestige research university. But now it’s coming on strong with two other assets: audacity and money.
Kansas City mutual fund mogul Jim Stowers determined in the late ‘90s he would build the best biomedical research center in the world and endow its operation. Stanford came beckoning. “Wise” heads said build the center in Boston or the Bay Area, where there’s already a concentration of talent. Stowers say no; he wanted it in Kansas City. A generation ago he’d been counseled not to build his business, now American Century Funds, in the presumed backwaters of Kansas City. He ignored that advice too.
The Stowers Center for Medical Research opened one year ago, just across the street from the gate to the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Stowers surveyed the fondest wishes of top international scientists and built a $200 million facility and a working environment made to order. Proving it was on target, the Stowers Center astonished the bioscience community by grabbing the first half dozen stars on their talent wish-list. Links with Kansas University’s nearby medical school and research-oriented hospital are growing.
The eventual Stowers endowment for operations could exceed $2 billion, giving the institute serious staying power, while most other aspiring regions are tied to now constrained public funding. And this fall two major institutional surprises are breaking toward a KC bioscience future.
The Health Midwest firm, which owned a third of the region’s hospital capacity, recently consummated a highly anticipated sale of all its assets to HCA for $1.1 billion. Under Missouri law, $600-800 million of that sale will morph into a new foundation for healthcare ventures. Overnight, this foundation would be the second or third largest in a region already rich in philanthropies.
Meanwhile the region’s largest funder — the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation — just got a new head, Carl Schramm. The civic buzz around the region is that Schramm will waste no time in executing a major shift in priorities. Small grants will be out; big bioscience grants, especially those with impact on economic development, will be in.
If all this falls into place, we’ll see whether audacity and a rising stash of cash actually delivers a biomedical breakthrough, earning respect — even in a region the biotech gurus would have dismissed out of hand.