In the early 1990s, the Cleveland Foundation sought to bridge the nearly century-old rift between University Hospitals of Cleveland (UH) and the Cleveland Clinic and to illuminate how the region’s economy could be restructured if these clinical competitors could collaborate on medical research and education. Few people believed that anything could be done to repair the fractured relationship, but foundation chairman and UH trustee John J. Dwyer and Robert E. Eckardt, then senior program officer for health, urged the board to use the foundation’s convening powers to raise the issue publicly.
In 1991, the foundation formed the Study Commission on Medical Research and Education, a panel of nationally prominent medical administrators and corporate executives chaired by William G. Anlyan, M.D., chancellor for health at Duke University. The commission was charged with recommending possible avenues of collaboration among UH, the Clinic, the school of medicine at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and Metropolitan General Hospital, the precursor of MetroHealth, Cleveland’s public hospital system. To emphasize its serious intent, the foundation suspended grantmaking in the areas of medical research and education until the study commission released its findings.
Published in the summer of 1992, the commission’s final report raised awareness of the promise of biotechnology as an economic driver for the region, but it did not produce changes in institutional relationships overnight. Yet the study’s recommendations, which Eckardt and foundation director Steve Minter continued to bring to the attention of new leaders at the concerned institutions over the next decade, planted seeds that ultimately bore fruit.
In 1995, CWRU’s school of medicine, which had long been exclusively associated with UH, entered into a joint venture with the Cleveland Clinic to create a center of excellence in structural biology. With significant ongoing support from the foundation for faculty recruitment and state-of-the-art equipment, the Cleveland Center for Membrane and Structural Biology built a vibrant research community dedicated to accelerating the discovery of therapeutic agents to slow, prevent or even reverse an array of diseases and conditions.
Another important collaboration took shape in 2002, when UH, the Clinic and CWRU joined forces to help found BioEnterprise, a state-supported initiative aimed at facilitating the commercialization of locally developed bioscience technologies and fostering the growth of biomedical companies in northeastern Ohio. The foundation’s initial commitment of $4 million was the first private funding the initiative received, and it rallied the philanthropic community around the venture. With significant ongoing support from the foundation and other private funders, BioEnterprise has created, recruited or grown more than 170 biomedical companies to date, and those companies have in turn attracted more than $1.5 billion in new venture capital. More than 500 technology transfer deals have been arranged with industry partners by BioEnterprise.
The nagging fear that northeastern Ohio might miss the opportunity to reinvent itself as a national center of innovation and entrepreneurship in the biosciences and biotechnology has been replaced by pride in the sector’s solid performance. In the mid-1990s, Cleveland was not a leading biotechnology market. Fifteen years later, the situation had changed. In 2011, Cleveland bested its peer cities in the Midwest both in the number of biomedical companies that successfully raised venture capital (43) and in the total dollars raised ($226 million). The synergistic relationships that have been nurtured between the region’s medical-research institutions and its biotechnology entrepreneurs have clearly paid off.
In 2013, the Cleveland Clinic concluded its long search for a partner with whom to collaborate on medical education. In June, the Clinic and CWRU announced the decision to relocate the university’s school of medicine to a new $80 million facility on the Clinic’s campus. With $50 million in construction monies already in hand—including a $10 million commitment from the Cleveland Foundation, its largest grant to date—the school will be ready to educate and train the next generations of physicians by 2016. Its opening will burnish Greater Cleveland’s reputation as a healthcare mecca and swell the ranks of young doctors contributing fresh ideas and energy to the region’s biotechnology pipeline.