Business
funds that supported the establishment of the core facility. Thus starts one of two fates: either continued strong support through supplementation from the university, or the new struggle for financial stability, a battle for self sustainability. The University of Kansas High Throughput Screening core was started in 2007 as a university core lab, and was not part of the MLSCN or MLPCN screening labs. KU-HTSL has achieved self sustainability through a combina- tion of federal funding and support from its collabo- rators and clients, including academic researchers, biotechs, pharma and disease foundations. We would like to offer what we have learned from the past few years as helpful principles for achieving and maintaining self sustainability, to other academic screening labs5 (Table 1). This advice should serve useful to other types of service cores as well, as many of these are generally applicable advice, such as the familiar SWOT analysis, for identifying and address- ing the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to the function and survival of the laborato- ry (Table 2).
Core Laboratories at the University of Kansas
There are 15 core service laboratories at the University of Kansas6 (Table 3). Five of these cores originated prior to the 1990s and have stood the test of time. Not surprisingly, these early cores serve critical needs, such as animal care, mass spec- trometry and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) services. No currently existing cores originated in the 1990s, but since 2000, 10 new cores have orig- inated at the University of Kansas and remain today, along with the pioneer core service labora- tories. Newer technologies from the past 10 years have brought about the rise of these new service labs, such as cores for high throughput screening, bioinformatics and proteomics.
Financial supplementation
Academic High Throughput Screening Core Facility (AHTSCF) budgets rely primarily on insti- tutional support and fees charged to collaborating investigators in exchange for screening services. AHTSCFs, like most service core labs, require varying degrees of internal, institutional financial assistance to keep their service costs competitive. This is a win-win scenario for the service lab and the university, as the AHTSCF offers discounts for university investigators, and higher rates for exter- nal and for-profit collaborators. Since competitive pricing structures do not pull in enough revenue to maintain self-sustainability, the AHTSCF is contin- ually dependent on funding from grants or direct
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support from the presiding department at the aca- demic institution.
The degree to which an AHTSCF relies on insti- tutional support depends on the funding the core is receiving from the government, collaborators, foun- dations and other sources. During the first five to 10 years of its operation, a typical AHTSCF should expect to receive half of its operating costs from these sources or from the parent institution. This gives the core screening lab flexibility to focus on establishing and executing a self-sufficiency action plan. This plan may include tasks such as develop- ing its customer base, establishing its core services, training staff, gaining experience in core operations, and developing a realistic business model. The remainder of the operating budget is derived from service fees, which are not intended to garner profits, but rather to recover costs and maintain operations. With time and prudent business deci- sions, the AHTSCF should slowly wean off of the institutional support, replacing it with income from the ever-increasing customer base and higher oper- ating efficiency. Even if and when self-sufficiency is met, support from the parent department should still be available in situations of unexpected costs, such as a dip in clients, loss of funding, or to smooth out budget bumps from replacement and upgrade of expensive screening platforms. In this way, institu- tional support can provide security to the screening core in the face of competition, to maintain the integrity and service function of the lab.
Funding and Governance The KU-HTSL, now starting its fifth year, is sup- ported by a variety of mechanisms (Table 4). KU HTSL is supported, in part, by the Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE),
Table 2: HTS core lab SWOT analysis 61
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