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Byrd center's finances anemic

Tribune file photo by SCOTT ISKOWITZ (2007)

The Florida Legislature spent more than $70 million on research programs and construction of the building on Fletcher Avenue for the Johnnie B. Byrd Sr. Alzheimer's Center & Research Institute.

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By LINDSAY PETERSON

lpeterson@tampatrib.com

Published: July 12, 2009

TAMPA - Seven years after the Legislature agreed to build an Alzheimer's center in Tampa, patients and researchers, and even the mice they study, are all together in a gleaming, new seven-story building at the University of South Florida.

With a new chief executive officer and a new strategic plan for the Johnnie B. Byrd Sr. Alzheimer's Center & Research Institute, its future would seem to be bright. But there's a problem. It's about to run out of money.

After the Florida Legislature spent more than $70 million on research programs and construction of the building on Fletcher Avenue, it said "no more" last year.

It wasn't a surprise. The institute has been roiled by one political controversy after another since prickly House Speaker Johnnie Byrd pushed its first appropriation through in 2002.

The question is whether the institute named for Byrd's father can recover.

The new CEO says he has no doubts, but he concedes precious time has been lost.

USF Medical School Dean Stephen Klasko took charge of the Byrd center last summer when its board agreed it couldn't survive as an independent center. The merger with USF became official this month.

"The drama is over now," Klasko said. And state lawmakers have a choice. "Do they want a statewide Alzheimer's center? ... Do they want to create something special in the state or not?"

Nearly 450,000 people in Florida are suffering from the destructive, incurable brain disease. "We have one of the highest incidents of Alzheimer's in the country. It's an epidemic that will cost billions," Klasko said.

'Incredible potential'

Byrd's predicament is ironic to Cliff Gooch, USF neurology department chairman, who took on the task of uniting under one roof all the people at USF - from psychologists to molecular biologists - who were working on Alzheimer's disease.

"We've created this incredible potential, and now they pull the plug," he said.

But even as Byrd's reserves dwindle, USF Professor David Morgan is in high spirits. He knows researchers across the world who are begging their governments for the kind of laboratory space he has as Byrd's new chief science officer.

The state may be balking, but the National Institutes of Health is paying for much of the research he supervises at USF. And he's busy writing grants for more.

"I want to build a first-class center for the 21st century," he said.

A professor of molecular pharmacology and physiology, he's a longtime member of the worldwide fraternity of scientists who have spent decades trying to untangle the mystery of Alzheimer's.

Long ago, researchers studying the brains of people who died of Alzheimer's disease found what they call amyloid plaques, hard substances made of clumped bits of proteins and nerve cells.

They don't know what role these formations play in the development of Alzheimer's disease, except that they are involved in the massive death of brain cells. One line of thought is that preventing amyloid production and clearing amyloid from the brain can stave off the disease or allow a damaged brain to restore itself.

Researchers have come up with dozens of drugs that reduce the signs of Alzheimer's disease in mice. They're testing about 10 to see whether they're safe and effective in humans.

Morgan and other USF researchers helped develop one of those drugs. They also helped create one of the primary research tools, a mouse genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's disease early in life. About 4,000 of these mice live in the center's basement.

On the upper floors of the Byrd building, a couple dozen scientists and their assistants are examining cells from the mice brains, looking for amyloid deposits and other signs of disease. They're trying to map Alzheimer's devastating sequence of events and see whether new treatments are interrupting the process.

"We know that even in the earliest stages of the disease people's brains are filled with amyloid," Morgan said. "It doesn't progress because you build up more and more. It's been building for 10 years before you get the disease."

This raises a crucial question, Morgan said. "How do we diagnose very early who is at risk?"

Researchers on other floors of Byrd are working on that piece of the puzzle.

For years, the USF Memory Disorders Clinic diagnosed and counseled people with Alzheimer's disease. At the same time, the Eric Pfeiffer Suncoast Alzheimer's & Gerontology Center offered clinical trials of Alzheimer's drugs as did Byrd researchers.

Now, through Gooch's persuasion, all three are together in the Byrd building with the laboratory researchers. Only a handful of research centers across the world have everyone - from the patient counselors to the basic researchers - in the same place, Morgan said.

"The ideas that we have up here we can immediately take to clinicians who are treating patients and find out ways that we might be able to run small clinical trials in house," he said.

But it took seven rough years to get to this stage.

Tumultuous beginnings

From the beginning, House Speaker Byrd, now out of the Legislature, wanted the institute to be an independent operation. It would be on the USF campus, but its researchers would account to its own board of directors.

Byrd used his power as House speaker to push through the first $25 million appropriation in 2002. But lawmakers fought the next year over his demand for $45 million more. He didn't get it.

He managed to have the center named for his father in 2004, but the next year, after his term as speaker ended, lawmakers tried to rename it for President Ronald Reagan, who died with the disease.

In 2006, lawmakers passed a bill earmarking $60 million for Byrd over the next four years, but disbanded the original board, which critics said was packed with Byrd allies, and set up a new board appointed mostly by legislative leaders.

Then Byrd, who kept a board seat throughout, turned on his own administrators, criticizing them for what he said was excessive travel and public relations spending, and trying, unsuccessfully, to have several of them fired.

The proposed merger with USF stirred up more controversy as Byrd and other board members said they would rather get nothing from the state than give up their independence. They later changed their position. Byrd now says the merger was the right thing to do.

"I think the future is very bright with Klasko," he said. "He's the right man at the right time."

In spite of all the controversy, in 2005, then-center director Huntington Potter put together a statewide consortium of Alzheimer's researchers, with the Byrd center in the lead. It obtained a five-year, $7.3 million federal grant government and designation as a national Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.

In 2007, the institute opened its building on Fletcher Avenue.

But as of this spring, Byrd's reserves had shrunk to about $8 million. Klasko was concerned about how the Legislature's latest funding refusal would affect its efforts to renew the five-year federal grant and national center designation.

"It's very hard to get accredited and a challenge to maintain it," Gooch said. "If we had gotten the state money, it would be a slam dunk. Without it, we'll have to see."

State Rep. Kevin Ambler, R-Tampa, said the center probably would have been funded this year if the state hadn't been in a budget crisis. He tried to find operating money for the center after the session ended, but failed.

Other lawmakers still have doubts about the center.

"I support it being part of USF," said state Sen. Nan Rich, D-Sunrise, a member of the Senate Health and Human Services appropriations committee. "But over the past few years, the reports we were getting on the committee were very disturbing. Their infrastructure and administrative costs were high."

The doubts persist despite layoffs last year and the center's reorganization under Klasko.

The center will survive without state money, Klasko said, but without a dedicated source of income, it won't be able to recruit the best scientists, and its statewide mission is likely to shrink.

In the past few months, Klasko has traveled the state to shore up the center's ties with other Alzheimer's researchers. He also has been seeking private philanthropic money.

"We have a jewel here in Tampa," he said. "Yes, it had organizational issues. Yes, it shot itself in the foot. Yes, it has a political history. But what in Florida hasn't?"

Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834.

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