The Institute for Systems Medicine, which just received a $675,000 grant to help establish a human tissue bank and a clinical data repository here for biomedical researchers to use in studies, also will seek a federal grant for the project, has revamped its board of directors, and is looking to hire a full-time executive, its chairman says.

Tom Paine, the institute's chairman and Avista Corp.'s director of governmental relations, says five new members were named to ISM's board in December, when he also was elected chairman, because ISM needed board members who could devote more time to the organization.

The organization must be "highly active" in 2010 to succeed in its efforts to establish research infrastructure with the tissue bank and clinical data repository, Paine says.

"That's one reason why we're looking at hiring a full-time, permanent CEO," Paine says. "We need a 50-hour-a-week person." Tony Bonanzino, former CEO of Hollister-Stier Inc., of Spokane, has been serving as ISM's CEO, but is able to do that only on a part-time basis, Paine says.

Some board members didn't have enough time to devote to the increasing demands of the board's work, he says. New members include Bonanzino; Dr. Katherine Tuttle, medical and research director of Providence Medical Research Center here; Bryan Slinker, dean of the Washington State University school of veterinary medicine; Dennis Horn, dean of the school of engineering and applied sciences at Gonzaga University; and Tom Fritz, CEO of Inland Northwest Health Services, the Spokane nonprofit that operates St. Luke's Rehabilitation Institute, the Northwest MedStar air-ambulance service, and a health information technology network that links 40 hospitals in the West.

ISM was founded in 2003 by Spokane developer John Stone and others, who originally hoped to raise $100 million to bring highly qualified scientists to Spokane to apply a "systems-based" approach to medical research made possible by the completion of the mapping of the human genome, or genetic code. That vision was scaled down later.

On Dec. 21, the Health Sciences & Services Authority of Spokane County (HSSA) signed contracts to award $675,000 to ISM and $225,000 to Project Access, a nonprofit network of volunteer practitioners here that provides medical care to low-income uninsured people.

The HSSA was created in 2007 by the Washington Legislature, and the grants it awards are funded by diversion of a 0.02 percent sales and use tax here, or $1.4 million a year, to pay for health-care research and services in Spokane County. Otherwise, that money would go to the state of Washington.

In late December, the HSSA also sought proposals for a $100,000 grant to support long-term improvements in the efficiency of providing health-care services here, and it says it expects to announce a competition soon for a $450,000 bioscience research grant. Paine says ISM likely will compete for the latter grant.

The planned tissue bank is seen as an important piece of infrastructure for biomedical research, Paine says.

"Kathy Tuttle will tell you one of the things that puts her at a disadvantage when she applies for National Institutes of Health grants is that she doesn't have a tissue bank here," Paine says. Tuttle has been involved in several medical research projects here, including a recent study that has discovered what's believed to be a link between elevated levels of phosphorus in the bloodstream and a deadly form of heart disease.

Tissue banks hold frozen human tissue samples retained for future study by researchers. Paine says it's uncertain at this point whether the tissue bank that will be established here will be at a centralized site or at multiple sites near Spokane-area hospitals.

"There are different kinds of tissue banks," Paine says. "Some are created around studies." In those, tissue is retained from a pre-selected sample or group of patients, but the tissue bank here would be much more universal, Paine says. "We want to have as broad an array of tissue samples as we can get" to support as many types of research studies as possible, he says.

The clinical data repository also is seen as an important piece of infrastructure for research, and the repository ISM plans will be voluminous, Paine says. He says that's because it will draw on the cases of thousands of patients who have been treated by providers linked to the health information technology network INHS operates.

"The data is 'de-identified'" to protect patients' privacy, Paine says. "There's big privacy requirements."

INHS says that its health information technology network links more than 6,000 physicians in 40 hospitals and other health-care facilities and 450 clinics and offices and includes more than 3.5 million electronic medical records. Such a vast amount of clinical information could be invaluable for a researcher who wanted to analyze how different medications, devices, or techniques affected outcomes, Paine says.

Kenn Daratha, an assistant professor of nursing at Washington State University, says he's working to buy computer equipment for the clinical data repository and has assembled an advisory board of academic, clinical, and public health representatives to provide guidance on such issues as the geographic area from which patient data will be drawn for the repository.

Paine says the $675,000 grant won't cover all the costs of setting up the human tissue bank and clinical data repository, and he adds, "We're going to be applying for federal money in the next month or so." He says ISM will seek grants that will total less than $1 million and is hopeful that the funds will be approved because the Obama administration has talked often about using the information-handling capabilities of computers to make U.S. health care more efficient.

Meanwhile, ISM still plans to join forces with Spokane County to "monetize" the value of the 15-year, $1.4 million-per-annum revenue stream provided by the sales tax that is diverted to the HSSA here, Paine says.

To accomplish that, Spokane County would issue perhaps $15 million in bonds, which would be repaid with the money from the tax, and those funds would be invested in biomedical and bioscience research much sooner than otherwise would be possible as tax receipts come in over time, he says.

Given the difficult state of the economy, no assumptions will be made in the bond issue that the revenue stream will grow by, say, 3 percent a year, a figure that's been used in past bond issues to estimate how much tax revenue will grow as the local economy grows, he says.

Both HSSA and ISM can seek grants elsewhere in addition to the sales and use tax receipts, Paine says. He adds that ISM is now debt free thanks to help from its financial partners, which include Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center & Children's Hospital, Gonzaga University, Washington State University, and Avista.