Seeds of collaboration

Cloud Gate sculpture in downtown Chicago.J. FUSTE RAGA/CORBIS

Chicago, popularly known for its gangsters, sports fans and deep-dish pizza, also has a cluster of impressive research institutions that often get overshadowed by the elite universities on both US coasts. But now, the city's biggest research players are beginning to team up, combining their time, talent and collective strengths to earn serious federal funding.

In the past year, the Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the University of Chicago and Northwestern University have landed four of 46 Department of Energy (DOE) 'Energy Frontier Research Center' (EFRC) grants worth $19 million apiece, as well as several US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) awards worth $10 million or more. These awards alone should create a few hundred jobs in Chicago, thus cementing the city's recent successes in garnering science funding across multiple disciplines.

The state of Illinois, and Chicago in particular, has succeeded by diversifying its research portfolio — in 2008, it ranked ninth in landing NIH money in the top 50 institutions for grants nationwide (UIC ranked 48th with $134 million, Northwestern came in 37th with $168 million and the University of Chicago was placed 28th with $194 million). Illinois also ranked fifth in terms of both NSF ($257 million) and DOE grants ($30.8 million).

These institutions have historically done well in securing federal research funding. But recent successes in landing large collaborative grants that have boosted each university's total have come about very much by design. In 2002, a philanthropic fund set up by the Searle family, which built its fortune on pharmaceuticals such as the first oral contraceptive and the anti-inflammatory drug Celebrex, saw an opportunity to turn rival institutions into collaborators. The family formed the Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC), supplied it with $5 million and mandated funding partnerships.

The CBC has dedicated the money to symposia, supplemental grant money and shared facilities. These facilities include a proteomics centre at UIC, a cellular screening centre at the University of Chicago and a mass spectrometry centre at Northwestern. Yearly CBC-sponsored symposia allow researchers from each of the universities to meet and plan for joint projects. And CBC funds help support collaborative research by topping up successful grants that span multiple Chicago research institutions. The CBC has caused a cultural shift in Chicago's research landscape, says CBC scientific director Jonathan Silverstein. "For a long time, these were essentially competing institutions," Silverstein says.

The collaborations help because many projects simply cannot be done in isolation. "There are problems that are sufficiently large and sufficiently complex that one person, one department, one institution can't do them," says Donald Levy, vice-president of research at the University of Chicago. Chicago already has some glue that can help hold such large projects together, he says — Argonne. The national laboratory possesses both the supercomputing power, such as Blue Gene, and expensive scientific equipment, such as the Advanced Light Source synchrotron, that can serve as common ground for structural biology and materials science research.

Illinois's Argonne National Laboratory has Blue Gene (above) supercomputing power at its fingertips.ARGONNE NATL LAB.

In August, that glue got stronger. The NSF awarded $30 million to improve TeraGrid, a distributed network of 11 supercomputing sites. One of the grant's two recipients, Ian Foster, directs the Computation Institute, which is split between Argonne and the University of Chicago. The grant will allow scientists at each of the sites to increase the network's speed and usability.

Users can book computing time, then tap into the grid's power to perform complex calculations and visualizations, from simulating earthquakes to modelling human blood flow and the impact of plaque formation in the arterial system. "Data-intensive science is an area where Chicago seems to have a critical mass of people," Foster says. Having ready access to supercomputing nodes acts like a magnet to make that mass denser and stronger.

For Kevin White, having accessible computing power was a necessity. The first professor to receive CBC funding, White, the director of the Institute of Genomics and Systems Biology at the University of Chicago, received a joint appointment with Argonne, which would provide him the resources necessary to do his computation-heavy work. They gave him $1 million to start his lab. Then, when he landed a $9.1-million grant from the NIH's Human Genome Research Institute to identify the transcription factors that control how and when genes express proteins, the CBC gave him a 'lever grant' of $3 million to build research tools that will benefit the other universities. That leverage paid off last year with a five-year, $15-million grant from the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences to become one of 10 NIH-designated systems biology institutes.

The CBC provided him with plenty of space and the NIH with plenty of money. Now White looks to fill rows of empty benches and computer terminals — some with views of Lake Michigan — with a mix of computational and experimental biologists. White expects to grow the number of principal investigators from four now to 20 in a few years. Meanwhile, he's working with other groups both in the United States and abroad. With the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, he helped develop a technology where researchers can make 'movies' of real-time gene expression in organisms under microscopes. Closer to home, he's working with the University of Chicago Cancer Center, Northwestern University and UIC to create expression profiles of breast-cancer tumours.

Northwestern, too, has benefited from working with its former competitors, says Jay Walsh, Northwestern's vice-president for research. The university's need to find research collaborators was born of necessity, with much of its science faculty 'crammed' into a relatively small corner of campus. "None of our departments are big enough that they can stand alone," Walsh says, "When faculty look to collaborate, they have to look outside."

The university had another opportunity to form an external partnership when, four years ago, Northwestern, the University of Chicago and UIC began jointly managing Argonne. "What that does is it brings us together on a regular basis and binds us," says Walsh. It also allows for individual expertise to be both shared and polished. For example, Wayne Anderson has secured the university's (NSF's) single biggest grant — $30 million to solve protein structures, using high-throughput technology to crystallize them, Argonne's Advanced Photon Source synchrotron to probe them and the Computation Institute to model their three-dimensional shapes.

Northwestern's relationship with Argonne has helped the university win two EFRC awards, each worth $19 million. Both are seeking cheaper, cleaner ways to create energy. Each of the centres will probably result in the hiring of 25–30 new personnel, according to Michael Wasielewski, a Northwestern chemistry professor who landed one of the EFRC grants. Wasielewski already works with Argonne scientists on the Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research (ANSER) Center. The grant will enable his team to analyse photosynthesis for ways to create more efficient photovoltaic cells and create hybrid solar cells that have both organic and inorganic components. "The people involved in this now are really serious about solving the problem," he says. "They're not looking at this as just another funding source."

Ironically, Wasielewski has some friendly competition. His Northwestern colleague Bartosz Grzybowski, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, received a similar EFRC grant — and is taking a completely different approach. Wasielewski looks to improve photovoltaic cells in small increments rather than in seemingly impossible leaps. Grzybowski seeks something more dramatic — harnessing the power of materials under conditions far from equilibrium. "It might be in the category of crazy," Grzybowski says. "But I don't think it is."

Crazy or not, Grzybowski's approach requires recruiting lots of brains. "The biggest chunk of money is going to people," he says. Grzybowski aims to recruit the top chemists in the world to his effort — especially ones with nanotechnology experience. Mary Jo LaDu, associate professor of anatomy and cell biology in the UIC College of Medicine, is also looking beyond the boundaries of Chicago to staff her $10-million project to characterize the apoE protein, thought to play a central role in Alzheimer's disease. LaDu received the $10 million grant on 15 August and has already assembled a dream team of researchers from UIC, the University of Kentucky, Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Georgetown University in Washington and the University of South Florida in Tampa. A transgenic mouse she developed serves as a binding component in the collaboration.

But LaDu is going beyond her mouse model to create a more cohesive apoE community. The collaboration will include a yearly symposium at varying sites that will give young, emerging researchers almost as much time to talk as keynote speakers. LaDu is also building a website that will allow researchers outside the grant to access the group's reagents, techniques and findings. Her goal for the website? To ask participants "What do you know? What do you have? What do you think?" says LaDu.

All the new collaborative grants should collectively bring hundreds of new researchers into the area. And the team approach — fostered by the CBC — is changing the way these groups interact with each other. "The old philosophy was 'Oh my God! The other guy is beating us'," says Levy. The new one turns former competitors into cheerleaders. "You look upon the other guy's success as your success," Levy says.