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President of U.Md., Baltimore receives top bioscience award

by Karl B. Hille, The Examiner

David Ramsay, president of University of Maryland, Baltimore, has done perhaps more than anyone to make Maryland a national leader in bioscience and biotechnology, an influential business group says.

“He has championed his researchers and encouraged them to commercialize their work. He has built a biopark and grown the research capacity of a top-level university,” Donald Fry, president of the Greater Baltimore Committee, said Tuesday at the GBC’s third annual Bioscience Awards ceremony.

Fry credited Ramsay with helping redevelop the West Baltimore area around the university’s downtown campus.

The university’s biopark has grown to 340,000 square feet of biotech research space in the past five years, representing $110 million in capital investment and contributing to the creation of 200 biotech jobs, Fry said.

Ramsay said he came to the university focused on teaching, but soon found himself thrust into business development when a professor sought to create a business based on research done in his university lab.

“We didn’t have policies, we didn’t have procedures, we just did it,” Ramsay said.

Almost as soon as that partnership began, other professors looked for ways to capitalize on their research.

“I believed in those very early days that we could carve out relationships that would preserve academic life and promote enterprise and provide relationships that would keep it all together,” Ramsay said.

Since Ramsay became president, research spending at UMd.’s Baltimore schools increased fivefold, to $411 million last year.

In the past three years, the university has completed 64 licenses for commercial use of university-funded research with biotech and pharmaceutical companies in and outside Maryland.

This year, another 300,000 square feet will be added to the biopark, and 150 more jobs will be created as a result, the university said.

The GBC also presented these awards:

  • Best New Product or Progress Award: Timothy E. Askew, president and chief executive officer, CSA Medical Inc., which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze out throat cancer.
  • Entrepreneurship Award: Julie D. Suman, co-founder and president of Next Breth LLC, which develops inhaler and mist applications for new pharmaceuticals.
  • Leadership in Bioscience Award: Dr. Blake M. Paterson, CEO and co-founder of Alba Therapeutics Corp., which developed the first FDA-approved medication for celiac disease.