Dr. Jeff Trent Head of (TGEN)

The big announcement came last June.

After a four-month, $90 million fundraising effort that included an $8 million investment from UA, university and civic leaders across the state learned they had landed the scientific equivalent of a lottery jackpot.

One of the best geneticists in the nation was moving to Arizona, and he would be leading an effort to turn the state into a leader in the biosciences.

That man, Dr. Jeff Trent, a world-renowned geneticist who earned his doctorate at the UA, heads the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), which has become the most high-profile sign of the state's biosciences investment.

TGen is a non-profit biosciences research institute that partners with the universities, as well as other public and private groups around the state. In TGen's labs, researchers take scientific discoveries made in a lab and "translate" them into practical uses, such as medicines.

"It's a focus on speeding up the process and working in a collaborative way with people doing the same thing," said Francie Noyes, a TGen spokeswoman.

The research done in university laboratories is often theoretical and scientific, without immediate practical value. When Trent formed TGen, he wanted Arizona to have a mechanism that would bridge the gap between research and application.

In other words, he founded TGen to quickly turn scientific discoveries into medical treatments.

That can't happen without the discoveries, and that's where partnership with the universities becomes important.

"The strength in the universities is a fundamental reason TGen exists," Noyes said. "This raises up what we can do almost exponentially, the fact that all this was here."

The precise nature of the university partnerships has yet to be defined, but officials from both TGen and UA say faculty members could work for both the non-profit group and the university.

"We are jointly recruiting faculty," said Dr. Ray Woosley, UA's vice president for health sciences.

The possibility for working with the universities helped convince Trent to move to Arizona, Noyes said.

"What Dr. Trent says repeatedly is the kind of work TGen wants to do cannot be done by one place," Noyes said. "When he talks about collaboration with the universities there's absolutely no question that it's going to be real."

Already, Noyes said, a bond with the universities is evident. One of TGen's program directors who came from the National Institutes of Health is also a member of ASU's faculty.

President Pete Likins sits on TGen's board of directors, along with a variety of other educational, civic and business leaders.

TGen's work with UA will likely center around several areas in which university research is also strong, Noyes said.

Those areas include cancer research; neurogenomics, which studies illnesses such as autism and schizophrenia; and DNA sequencing, which Noyes describes as one of the building blocks of biosciences research.

"It's the fundamental scientific research that all the more specialized projects build on," she said.