NIOSH, SIRTI stand for cooperation

Caution: Acronyms ahead.

Fair warning just seems appropriate when dealing with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH. Combine that with SIRTI, for Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute, and there is real potential for some kind of work-related malady, maybe carpal-tunnel syndrome.

But what you also get under a pioneering agreement signed last week is greater potential for taking the results of federal research to market, in the process creating new local companies and jobs. NIOSH Director Dr. John Howard says the pact is the first signed with an organization like SIRTI, a business incubator and research center located on the Riverpoint Campus east of downtown.

“We’re open to partnerships with anybody who wants to do research,” says Howard, who was in Spokane to sign the contract with SIRTI.

He also conducted a national awards ceremony from NIOSH’s offices on East Montgomery. Among the winners was a paper entitled “Rapid Detection of Aerodynamic Size Range of Airborne Mycobacteria,” a mouthful indicative of the high-level research conducted at the institute’s seven offices.

Science, says Howard, is NIOSH’s only business. “We don’t hire people based on their marketing ability,” he says. “We don’t want to develop that kind of expertise.”

The agency is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, better known — and derided — as OSHA, falls under the U.S. Department of Labor.

NIOSH will be more familiar to many in the Inland Northwest as the old U.S. Bureau of Mines office, which barely escaped closure in the mid-1990s. Instead, the office and its 70 employees were folded into NIOSH. There are about 17 research projects under way, acting deputy director Mike Jenkins says.

Howard says finding partners willing to explore the commercial potential of NIOSH research helps assure the agency does not lose track of its basic mission: protecting worker safety.

Under the terms of its contract with SIRTI, NIOSH may offer the non-exclusive right to commercialize its technologies. A decision by SIRTI to pursue a licensing agreement triggers negotiations for an exclusive license. If SIRTI finds or creates a business that signs a licensing agreement, the CDC receives 80 percent of the royalties, SIRTI 20 percent. If the company goes public by selling stock, CDC gets 20 percent of the equity, SIRTI 20 percent.

Executive Director Kim Zentz says SIRTI made no up-front financial commitment to get the NIOSH contract. With the agreement in place, Commercialization Director Peter Mowery and other employees will review the NIOSH research portfolio to identify papers that show the most market potential, she says.

SIRTI could take NIOSH research to an existing company, help create a new company, or shop it to university researchers already working with a business.

“A big piece of it is match-making,” Zentz says.

Howard and Zentz say they hope a few quick successes will be profitable, but also raise awareness of NIOSH research.

NIOSH calls its commercialization program “Research to Practice,” or R2P. The agency award recognizing such work is named in part for the developer of the hard hat, one of the most widely used pieces of safety equipment.

Ninety percent of the research done in Spokane continues to be mining-related, but that portfolio will be expanding, Howard says. New projects will include work related to construction, transportation and — deep-sea fishing.

That unlikely stretch came about in part because the interim director of the Spokane office, Dr. George Conway, also oversees operations of the NIOSH office in Alaska. Conway says sharing the fishing-related research makes sense because, as in mining, much of the hazard is created by the nature of the equipment needed to get the job done.

NIOSH has been an overlooked component of Spokane’s scientific community. The link with SIRTI, not all that many blocks away, should join the federal institute with recent efforts to enhance the technology transfer that will add to the area’s economic growth.

R2P. Should be an acronym to thrive by.