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Oklahoma: The Research Capital of the Plains

Debra Levy Martinelli

Sound implausible? It shouldn't. It's happening now, with a big boost from Oklahoma's Economic Development Generating Excellence. Gov. Brad Henry launched EDGE in 2003 in cooperation with the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and the Oklahoma State Regents for Sample Image Higher Education. The state's citizens were invited to participate in drafting what would become a blueprint for Oklahoma's future, and thousands answered the call. Limited only by their imaginations, they made big, bold recommendations to improve the state's economy.

The first recommendation was to create a $1 billion endowment to support applied research being conducted in Oklahoma university laboratories, companies, and perhaps even a garage or two. This would enable Oklahoma to become a true research center, leading to the development of new jobs in homegrown companies and industries.

In 2005, the Oklahoma Legislature invested the first $150 million in the EDGE Endowment, and in November, the first five grant recipients were selected from 94 applicants. The two-year awards total about $13 million; each grantee will receive at least $1 million.

"The proposals were judged on scientific merit and soundness of the business plan," explains Paul Risser, executive director of the EDGE Policy Board and former chancellor of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. "The idea is to focus our investments where we really can make a difference."

Two of the five EDGE winners will use the money to support manufacturing scale-up operations; two others are developing Oklahoma hubs for the wind energy and aerospace industries; another will advance FDA-required clinical trials for a new treatment for eye diseases.

Sugar Science: A New Frontier

Oklahoma City-based Hyalose LLC is a pioneer in the field of sugar chemistry.

Sugars, along with DNA, protein and lipids, are the four major kinds of molecules in the human body, but because sugars are powerful and plentiful, scientists are just beginning to figure out the various ways they are used in the body. "We know that sugars are used as fuel," says Paul DeAngelis, the company's co-founder and co-chief scientist with fellow researcher-turned-inventor Paul Weigel. "But they're also signal molecules or building blocks for structures. The so-called sugar code is how cells tell each other, ‘You should grow, you should die, you need to move over there, you stay here... you stay a stem cell, and you develop into something else."

DeAngelis and his team have discovered and harnessed sugars to do different tricks they can't do in a live cell, selectively configuring them to create just the molecule desired in defined, repeatable sizes. In one project, they are developing sugar molecules that can cause cancer cells to commit suicide.

'Instead of putting a poison into the patient, this material would send the signal that knocks off the cancer,' DeAngelis explains. 'There's a lot of promise in it, but researchers need more material for trials. This manufacturing plant will be able to deliver enough for many trials and possibly first-level human testing.'

Hyalose will use the EDGE money to ramp up production from laboratory scale to mid-level manufacturing scale. The grant will provide critical funding in three areas:

• New equipment;
• Salaries for existing technical and new manufacturing personnel; and
• A subcontract with Cytovance Biologics LLC, an expert in biomedical manufacturing scale-up.

DeAngelis says the equipment is expected to be in place to begin ramped-up operations by mid-2009.

Improved Prosthetics: Ready for the Market

Orthocare Innovations is just over a year old but is already a leader in the prosthetic and orthotic industry. With its own growing intellectual property portfolio, as well as licenses to technology developed at such notable institutions as Oakridge National Laboratory and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and research funding from the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Defense and others, the Oklahoma City-based company now is focused on expanding its manufacturing capabilities.

Funding from EDGE is helping make that happen.

"The EDGE grant will allow us to grow faster than we might otherwise," explains CEO Doug McCormack. "We hope to leverage the EDGE money to gain the production capacity to manufacture devices we've spent the last year developing and push them into the marketplace."

Orthocare assembles, fabricates and tests prosthetics and orthotics, which it sells to customers who fit patients.

"We have technologies that are ready to go," McCormack says. "The Department of Defense is our first customer on computerized alignment technology that we'll start producing in 2009. The Veterans Administration already has identified a dozen sites where it will be rolled out."

With a current workforce of 25, the company plans to quadruple that number over the next three to four years. In addition to bringing in skilled personnel from within the prosthetics industry, the company is partnering with a technical school in Oklahoma City to train students for specific production jobs.

Wind Energy: An Oklahoma Powerhouse

With the federal Department of Energy predicting that 20 percent of electricity will come from wind by 2030, and Oklahoma projected to be second in installed wind power capacity by then, this new industry holds great promise to generate literally billions of dollars for Oklahoma's economy over the next few decades.

A consortium of academia, state government and private enterprise is turning that opportunity into reality with a strategic plan to build a wind energy powerhouse in Oklahoma.

Elements of the project, coordinated by Scott Greene, an OU geography professor and director of the Oklahoma Wind Power Initiative, are:

• Wind energy forecasting to develop technology that will improve existing wind forecasting services currently provided to wind farms;
• Wind resource assessment, or the process of determining the best locations for wind farms, taking into account issues like terrain, vegetation, environmental concerns, proximity to transmission lines and zoning laws; and
• Nurturing and growing the cultural and business environment necessary to attract to the state existing players in the wind power industry and training an Oklahoma workforce to support it.

The business model, Greene says, is based on Oklahoma's oil and gas industry. "When oil and gas were discovered here, people didn't just let someone else pump it out of the ground for them and sell it. They pumped it out and sold it themselves, and trained people to work at every level of the business. They created an economic base for Oklahoma and kept it here," he explains. "That's what we want to do with wind power."

Aerospace: Core of the Corridor

While America's dominance in the automobile industry has taken a tumble, that's not the case for its leadership in aerospace.

Moreover, Oklahoma is the logical place for its growth. Strategically located in the center of an aerospace corridor that stretches from Kansas to Texas, and with ten percent of its skilled workforce currently employed in the industry, plus potential employees displaced from the auto industry, Oklahoma is positioned to parlay its already significant aerospace presence into an undisputed hub.

A group of entrepreneurial-minded engineers at three Oklahoma universities, led by OU industrial engineering professor Shivakumar Raman, is using its EDGE money to 'connect the dots,' both geographically and functionally, among existing Oklahoma aerospace players to develop an industry organization, the whole of which will be infinitely more successful than the sum of its parts. The fundamental contribution to the state is in providing digitally enabled cutting-edge technologies for shape engineering and advanced manufacturing.

The business model developed by Raman's 13-member group consists of two parts:

• A core competency aerospace research center composed of existing engineering labs at the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and the University of Tulsa; and
• A small company that would partner with other Oklahoma aerospace concerns to meet the challenges of the industry, and also market the innovations generated at the research center.

'We're selling a service, not a product. We want to empower everyone involved in Oklahoma's aerospace industry to be competent and work collaboratively. The bottom line is to create jobs, retrain people for new jobs, and generate more spending and wealth in Oklahoma,' Raman explains.