Tom Stackhouse may be working at a desk these days, but he is no stranger to life as a research scientist. With a Ph.D. in biochemistry, he began his career at a pharmaceutical company before coming to work at SAIC-Frederick, Inc., in 1991 as a senior scientist in the Laboratory of Immunobiology. In partnership with Dr. Bert Zbar and an international team of scientists, he assisted in cloning a tumor suppressor gene.
Today he is still involved in partnerships, but on a much grander scale. As associate chief of the Technology Transfer Branch (TTB), Dr. Stackhouse manages a broad range of collaborative agreements that help NCI scientists move their discoveries out of the lab and into the world of clinical trials and, ultimately, new cancer therapies.
Partnerships Keep Science Moving Forward Dr. Stackhouse pointed out that partnerships are central to NCI’s mission to eliminate suffering and death due to cancer. Because cancer research is advancing so quickly, it’s impossible for a single entity to keep up with all of the exciting discoveries coming from laboratories throughout the world. By bringing together the expertise from many laboratories, collaborations enable research to advance more rapidly than a single entity could accomplish alone. “I think it’s now clearly recognized that we can’t do it on our own,” he commented. “We need to partner, whether that’s with universities or companies, to move things forward at a faster pace.”
Technology transfer agreements are the means to accomplish the information and material exchanges underlying these partnerships. Complex collaborative agreements are enabling NCI to establish initiatives that bring together investigators from a variety of disciplines “where normally the scientists weren’t talking to each other,” Dr. Stackhouse explained. “They are coming together in groups to establish brand new technologies that are going to accelerate the [development of] diagnostics and therapies for the patients.” The NCI Centers for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, which include the new Nanotechnology Characterization Laboratory at NCI-Frederick, represent an example of such collaborations. These centers resulted from an NCI initiative to bring together “engineers, biologists, and chemists to work on the development and characterization of nanoparticles to accelerate the growth of this new field and bring its potential benefits to the cancer patient.”
Keeping Up with the Pace According to Dr. Stackhouse, such initiatives exemplify NCI’s desire “to reach out and get people to start talking to each other more than perhaps they had in the past.” As more partnerships are established, the research gains momentum. Keeping up with the pace represents one of the biggest challenges the TTB faces. Dr. Stackhouse believes his office needs “to be flexible enough to move at the pace that our scientists are moving.” The TTB works to pave the way for collaborations, and when they happen, “things can really take off,” he said. His staff ensure that “we are being creative in establishing new partnerships that keep up with the pace of scientific discovery. We are in an explosion of new scientific information, and NCI-Frederick is a key player in it all.”
Hundreds of Agreements Every Year
As a satellite office of the main Technology Transfer Branch in Rockville, Md., Dr. Stackhouse’s group processes hundreds of agreements for NCI-Frederick every year. He noted that the scientific staff at NCI-Frederick represent roughly 35 percent of the total scientific staff at NCI, yet nearly 50 percent of the invention reports processed for all of NCI come from NCI-Frederick. He attributes this productivity to “the community atmosphere that we have on the NCI-Frederick campus. Because the campus is smaller, the sharing of innovative ideas and resources seems to take place more readily here.”
The Frederick TTB group manages all of the agreements relating to the exchange of materials and information, as well as the more complex cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs). Invention reports, including their review by the NCI Technology Review Group, are also coordinated by the TTB. Dr. Stackhouse noted that, while the formal patent writing and licensing functions are managed for all of the Institutes by the NIH Office of Technology Transfer (OTT), his group acts as a liaison between the OTT and the NCI inventors .
Technology Transfer Specialists: Natural Extension of the Laboratory The Frederick TTB staff are organized in a way that makes each specialist “a natural extension of the laboratories.” To maintain continuity, staff members are assigned to laboratories rather than being aligned by type of agreement. Dr. Stackhouse believes this structure “makes the most sense” because an invention may be about “a technology that was developed under a CRADA or other agreement with a collaborator and is moving forward for patent protection and then on to a commercialization license.” Having the same person managing all the agreements for a given technology is the most efficient structure.
Dr. Stackhouse likes to maintain a balance in the office between people with scientific backgrounds and those with administrative experience. The people who have worked at the bench “can appreciate what’s coming out of the intramural laboratories. They can understand [the science]…and work with our principal investigators here to move it forward.” Those with an administrative background “understand the policies and regulations that keep us working in a way that maintains the public’s trust in our Institute.” Cross-training is encouraged at all levels to keep skills sharp and relevant to changing needs.
Fellowship Program Offered Unique Opportunity The Technology Transfer Branch offers a fellowship program designed to recruit people from the lab or other professional environments, such as law, into this growing and very specialized field. “They are often unsure about how to make that transition, and this fellowship program gives them that opportunity,” Dr. Stackhouse explained. It was through this fellowship program that Dr. Stackhouse joined the Technology Transfer Program ten years ago. “It was a great opportunity that I haven’t regretted taking,” he commented. After a few months of training in the Rockville office, he was immediately assigned to the laboratory he had worked in at NCI-Frederick. Walking into the lab as a technology transfer specialist instead of as a scientist, he found, “was a little unnerving,” but, he added, “I was warmly welcomed in my new role and knew then I had made the right decision.” His experience in an SAIC-Frederick, Inc., laboratory was a real advantage in his new position, he said, because “I had worked on campus so long. I knew the system and I knew the people, and they recognized me as a fellow scientist. They felt comfortable talking to me.”
Part of a Larger Mission
Dr. Stackhouse appreciates the opportunity to be a part of a larger mission, finding reward in providing “the bridge between the NCI, or government, world and the commercial world, to bring the exciting new NCI technologies to the patients who need them." Working toward the ultimate goal of helping people fight such a devastating disease is gratifying, he said, because “I don’t think there is a person who has not been touched by cancer in their life.” What makes his work especially rewarding is “to be able to come to a job where, at the end of the day, you’ve made a step forward, maybe just a baby step some days, but you’ve made a step forward toward helping someone struggling with cancer.”
Key to the NCI’s Future Summing it up, Dr. Stackhouse noted, “Partnering with other researchers, whether they are commercial or academic, is going to be so key to the future of NCI, and that’s what we are here to do.” He welcomes the opportunity to create the partnerships so vital to NCI’s mission, saying, “We have [an] open door policy. We try to be as creative as we possibly can to get the job done.” He’d like the scientists at NCI “to just really consider us as part of their own laboratory mission; that’s what we are here to support.”
For more information on any aspect of technology transfer or the fellowship program, please call 301-846-5465, or visit the Web site at http://ttb.nci.nih.gov.
Nancy Parrish
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SAIC-Frederick, Inc.
National Cancer Institute at Frederick
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National Cancer Institute at Frederick
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National Cancer Institute at Frederick
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Tom Stackhouse may be working at a desk these days, but he is no stranger to life as a research scientist. With a Ph.D. in biochemistry, he began his career at a pharmaceutical company before coming to work at SAIC-Frederick, Inc., in 1991 as a senior scientist in the Laboratory of Immunobiology. In partnership with Dr. Bert Zbar and an international team of scientists, he assisted in cloning a tumor suppressor gene.
The Frederick TTB staff are organized in a way that makes each specialist “a natural extension of the laboratories.” To maintain continuity, staff members are assigned to laboratories rather than being aligned by type of agreement. Dr. Stackhouse believes this structure “makes the most sense” because an invention may be about “a technology that was developed under a CRADA or other agreement with a collaborator and is moving forward for patent protection and then on to a commercialization license.” Having the same person managing all the agreements for a given technology is the most efficient structure.