Kenneth Bayles, PhD, discussing UNMC/Nebraska Medicine's partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense
Item
Title
Kenneth Bayles, PhD, discussing UNMC/Nebraska Medicine's partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense
Date
11 November 2022
Description
Kenneth Bayles: [W]e have unique access to the biomedical portfolio of the DoD, unique access in the country compared to all other institutions, we had this special access. So then the question is how do you take advantage of that? How do you leverage that access? We have a seat at the table with this major department that's a big funding agency. So you got to figure out how to take advantage of that. And we're just kind of like building this plane as it's flying. And we made mistakes along the way, but then we eventually figured out that if we have a funding vehicle that makes it easy for the federal government to send us money, then we better be thinking about things that they want to buy, right? So that's when I started thinking about core capabilities that they might be interested in, and that's where I came up with the idea of the Nebraska Drug Discovery and Development Pipeline. I would go to different DoD labs and pitch this idea, “Come to us. I know you're interested in making different drugs that—” in, you know, in those days I was thinking about—as a microbiologist, I'm thinking about antibiotics and I was pitching this, “use this core capability to make antibiotics that would kill anthrax or that would kill tularemia bacteria or, you know, some of these biological weapons of mass destruction.” That was my pitch. They liked the concept, but there was a group within the DoD that had no interest in antibiotics. They were interested in countermeasures to radiation exposure. And so, they said, “Hey, we can use this core capability, but we want you to help us make radiation counter measures, radiation drugs.” And so, that's what we're doing now. We're making anti-radiation drugs for the federal government.
Rights
From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives