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Pennington Biomedical Research Center (PBRC) is one of the most powerful economic development assets in the Capital Region and Louisiana, attracting tens of millions of dollars in sponsored research and boasting world-class capabilities in nutrition and preventive medicine research.  In order to fully leverage PBRC's economic development potential, the state and region must do everything possible to foster its growth and development to ensure that it remains a positive economic influence on the local, regional, and state level.
 
BRAC's latest white paper, Advancing PBRC to Preeminence: Securing Louisiana's Knowledge-based Economic Foundation, details a strategy for elevating PBRC to a hierarchical position of biomedical research institutes, laying out the steps that the center and Louisiana would need to take in order for PBRC to be considered a top ten research facility within the next ten years.
 
The white paper presents a holistic view of PBRC, including its current strategic plan, funding and expenditure status, and commercialization activities.  It also identifies the attributes found in premier biomedical research facilities and describes the present state of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding.  Finally, it proposes a list of recommendations aimed at helping the center ascend to the upper-echelon of research institutes nationally by 2017.  Those recommendations include both PBRC- and state of Louisiana-directed aspects and consist of:

PBRC

• Growing sponsored research funding from NIH and other public and private funding sources by 300%
• Increasing research faculty size by 100%
• Increasing faculty start-up support by 100%
• Increasing faculty funding productivity by 7.5%
• Continuing to aggressively grow the building space to support sponsored research programs by ensuring that the new clinical research building is fully operational and that the Genomics and Molecular Biology Complex is in the planning stages
• Aggressively increasing commercialization activity by expanding the portfolio of patents, licensed technologies, and start-up companies based on PBRC innovations

 State of Louisiana

• Developing a progressive plan to increase state appropriations to PBRC to $30MM annually within three to five years
• Investing $125.4MM in PBRC's Genomics and Molecular Biology Complex plan
• Supporting the development of PBRC's CATAlyst program with a 1-1 funding match
  

Based on economic multiplier calculations, BRAC predicted an annual economic impact of $135MM to Louisiana once these recommendations are fully integrated.  Currently, every one dollar of state investment returns more than three dollars in external funding.

Read the full white paper.