Michael Longaker got interested in medicine after he saw his college basketball coach, a diabetic, injecting himself with insulin. After finishing degrees at Michigan State University and Harvard Medical School, he went to do a surgery residency at the University of California, San Francisco.

Michael Longaker

To fulfill his research requirement, Longaker spent a year in the lab of Michael Harrison, a pediatric surgeon who occasionally did human fetal surgery. Up until the third trimester of pregnancy, fetuses heal without a scar or the inflammation typically seen in postnatal children or adults. Harrison asked Longaker to study wound healing in the unborn.

Longaker went on to director-level positions studying scarring, wound healing and plastic surgery at the New York University School of Medicine before coming to Stanford to pursue tissue engineering as director of children's surgical research and regenerative medicine at Stanford University Medical Center. In 2003, he earned another degree, an M.B.A. from a joint program between the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University.

How did your come to work with your collaborators?

There's no better time to start doing a complicated long-term analysis than right now.

Just before Prop 71 was passed, I was asking questions about how they model the opportunity for the state. If you're running multibillion dollar deficits, how do you decide to sell bonds and go further in debt? Debt is good in good times but can haunt you in bad financial times. So I was referred to a business plan where this was modeled, and one of the people working on it was a professor of health economics at Stanford, and that was Laurence Baker.

Then the proposition passes, and I'm at UCSF giving a talk where the UK leadership in regenerative medicine is invited, and I meet Hank Greely [a Stanford law professor] who's talking about intellectual property in relation to stem cells. So I thought it would be really interesting to propose how you might assess a return on this investment. In our first meetings, I felt like we needed an interpreter.

What has the response to the article been?

Many people have been pleased. There's a very detailed example that looks at juvenile diabetes. Many people in the field like the fact that there's a tangible example of how it might help. And we chose an example where it wasn't a cure.

How can you track return on investments over the long term?

This would be an interesting project. You would probably propose to reassess it after three years. Has there been intellectual property that's been commercialized and is generating revenue streams? How many new people have come into the state? Our concern is we should start now. Our analysis and inputs will change as time goes on, but I think we should be able to track it.

Seven, twelve years from now may be more meaningful than the data we can grab now, but it's important because it's not federal money, it's state money that we track as near as we can what our returns are.

If a company is formed and has an IPO and you see value that's created and the state has blockbuster returns on IP, that's easy. But what we really want to get at is to figure out how many new people come into the state or how many new businesses come in or new researchers come in as a result of this opportunity because those people are buying homes and eggs and contributing to the tax base. There's no better time to start doing a complicated long-term analysis than right now.

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