Even before state lawmakers take up the bill for Governor Patrick’s $1 billion life sciences plan, Massachusetts is moving ahead with a $10 million research grant program.

Tinker Ready

About $10 million in state funding could become available to Massachusetts scientists as early as September as the state moves forward with its plan to bolster the economy by promoting biomedical research.

The state legislature still has to approve most of Governor Deval Patrick’s life sciences program: a ten-year, $1 billion plan that would include funding for a stem cell bank and an RNA interference research center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Lawmakers will also need to vote on proposed tax breaks for life science companies.

But the state already has the structure and some funds in place to launch a matching research grant program, says Stan McGee, Assistant Secretary for Policy and Planning at Massachusetts’s Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development.

“We don’t want to wait until the life science bill gets passed,” he says. “That puts a time line on this that is too slow for us.”

The board of the year-old Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, which will administer the grants, will meet to consider the proposed grant program on September 13. Board members could vote on it at that meeting or wait until their October meeting, says McGee. Once it approves the plan, the state agency aims to quickly put out a call for proposals and begin distributing grants, he adds.

Funding breakdown

The draft proposal calls for:

– three-year research grants of up to $100,000 per year for young researchers without substantial funding from the National Institutes of Health or other sources;

– “bridge” grants that would fund faculty whose research proposals earned high rankings at the NIH for their science but went unfunded;

– money for universities to recruit top scientists from outside the state. Both the recruitment and bridge grants would offer up to $250,000 per year.

– up to $200,000 per year for researchers collaborating with Massachusetts-based companies.

For all grants, the researcher’s institution or the industry sponsor would have to match them dollar for dollar. The proposal doesn’t specify any areas of research within the life sciences that will be funded.

This proposed grant program “points to obvious areas of need” by, for example, helping those suffering from the NIH funding shortfall, says Daniel Jay, a professor of physiology at Tufts University. Jay attended a June meeting in Cambridge, one of several where Patrick and his staff solicited ideas from policymakers, academics, and industry representatives about how to implement the 10-year plan.

“I, like most other scientists, am much more constrained than I was five years ago,” says Jay. “I’ve had to downsize my lab and I’m not alone in that.”

Cash control

McGee says one of the challenges facing the state will be to set up an appropriate peer review system for the grant proposals to “get the politics out of science.” The draft plan seeks to do that by asking institutions to rank their own nominees and by linking the grant proposals to NIH rankings, he says.

The board of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, which will run the grants program, consists of five members: two state officials; Jack Wilson, the president of the University of Massachusetts; Micheline Mathews-Roth, a Harvard professor of medicine; and Marc Beer, the CEO of Viacell, a Cambridge biotech company.

The Patrick bill would add two seats to the board and create a ten-member advisory committee drawn from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Collaborative, a private group of academic, industry and, government representatives formed last year and led by Harvard University provost and neurobiologist Steven Hyman. Who would make the recommendations and final decisions on the grant recipients hasn’t been determined yet, says McGee.

McGee stresses that the state is still seeking input on the matching grants draft and it could change before the upcoming meeting.

The bill for the rest of the Patrick plan was filed in July and is expected to be taken up when state legislators begin gearing up in mid-September. If passed, it would provide another $15 million this year and $25 million a year for 10 years in research funding.