Going Global With Genomics Gets Serious

By Jeff Hansel, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn.

Feb. 25–If you talk to Dr. Tomas Kara of the International Clinical Research Center in the Czech Republic, there’s no end to the possibilities.

The ICRC and research leaders from the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics are in the early stages of discussing whether they can begin a collaborative scientific relationship that could involve scientist exchange programs, shared research projects and technology development.

“They’ve got some great scientists. They’re doing some interesting work,” said Dr. Eric Wieben, Mayo Clinic project leader for the Minnesota Partnership, a collaboration between Mayo, the University of Minnesota and the state of Minnesota.

“The Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics is widely recognized in Europe as one of the leading projects in advanced biomedical research,” said Dr. Tomas Kara, medical director of the ICRC at St. Anne’s Hospital of the Masaryk University in Brno.

Kara invited Minnesota interest in the ICRC after traveling between the Czech Republic and Mayo in Rochester, where he lived while on a cardiovascular research fellowship.

The ties with the Czech Republic began five or six years ago when Kara was preparing to return to the Czech Republic, said Dr. Virend Somers, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist in Rochester who now serves as the international director of the Czech Republic’s ICRC.

At first, Kara wanted to develop a small, high-tech laboratory so he could continue working at the same level he’d been used to in Rochester.

“We began to evolve the idea into a larger, more encompassing, more ambitious project. And that’s what ended up eventually as the ICRC,” Somers said.

Mayo, ICRC and Czech government representatives all played a part in the eventual formation of the ICRC.

“It had to go through the Czech government and was formally approved,” Somers said. The Czech government changed leaders several times during that period — and the Czech Republic joined the European Union.

The Czech Deputy Minister of Health Marek Snajdr has visited Rochester already, and a variety of Czech physicians and researchers have worked at Mayo for periods of up to three years.

Also, Somers said, some Mayo researchers have gone to the city of Brno for short research projects.

“It’s been a remarkable learning experience to take something that would seem over-ambitious and improbable and to see it gradually develop a constituency, develop some form some substance, and to see it’s mission kind of become potentially a reality — and then to see all the support form very smart people,” he said.

After Wieben visited Brno, a lab-to-lab relationship began with Mayo and Czech researchers.

Because planning is in the early stages, Wieben said it’s still uncertain how the relationship might progress. Research exchange programs are one possibility, but so is simply bringing diverse, talented researchers from across the globe together in one location.

Wieben hopes a formal Minnesota Partnership-ICRC research agreement is possible. But the idea first appeared in October, so the whole concept is pretty new yet, Wieben said.

He doesn’t expect Minnesota Partnership money to be spent, now or in the future.

He believes mutual scientific goals will instead kick-start the collaboration. Already, Mayo and Czech researchers have “true scientific interaction” through research on protein prediction.

“We believe that establishing strong transatlantic partnerships between our two biotech clusters will give us the opportunity to leverage our joint intellectual, technological and financial resources, enabling us to perform much larger projects than we could do individually,” Kara said.

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