Kansas City, Mo ? “Hope for Life.”

The slogan for the Stowers Institute for Medical Research can be found everywhere on its $250 million, 600,000-square-foot campus — from the title of the DNA-helix sculpture at its entryway to a panel in its library that translates the phrase into two dozen languages.

When it comes to business leaders planning the future of the Kansas City-area economy, Stowers also seems to add the slogan, “Hope for Life Science Growth.”

“That has put a little bit of a spotlight focused on the region,” said Bill Duncan, president of the Kansas City Life Sciences Institute.

A spotlight also likely will be on the Stowers Institute as the Kansas Legislature begins its session today in Topeka, with lawmakers grappling with how to foster economic development in the state.

The institute, near the University of Missouri-Kansas City, was founded in 1994 by Jim and Virginia Stowers, who were inspired to create it after a bout with health problems in the late 1980s. Jim Stowers founded and was chairman of the mutual fund company American Century Cos. Inc.

The Stowers research facility opened in 2001. It has an endowment of $1.6 billion dedicated to basic research.

Now, 14 research teams — ranging from five to 12 scientists on each team — are working on basic projects to understand how genes and proteins control the inner workings of cells.

“We have a single mission — to do the highest-quality basic research, with no other issues complicating things for our researchers,” said Bill Neaves, president and CEO. “We work at the far upstream end, and it will eventually help prevent and cure disease.”

Bill Neaves is president and chief executive officer at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, Mo. Neaves talked recently about the success the institute has had in recruiting researchers to the area.

Success in recruitment

Neaves noted that unlike a university setting, researchers don’t have to worry about gaining tenure, sitting through faculty meetings, teaching classes or completing much paperwork — administrative staff are assigned to them to alleviate the workload.

Add Stowers’ facilities — which include new labs, conference rooms, an exercise facility and hotel-style rooms for visiting researchers — and Neaves said he’s had little trouble convincing researchers to come to Kansas City. He said the institute has had an 80 percent success rate hiring those it has recruited.

Those successes include Scott Hawley, who had never thought about moving his research to the Midwest before he heard about the Stowers Institute.

Hawley, who had been at the University of California-Davis, toured Stowers at the urging of Kent Golic, a collaborator and now a fellow Stowers researcher, and said he “fell in love with Kansas City.”

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“The facility is just an amazing place to do my work,” Hawley said. “It’s not even the money, it’s the attitude.

“One of the things that happens at a university is the scientists and scholars exist to serve the university. Here, this place exists to serve the experiments. They make the administration as transparent as possible. I can spend my time on experiments, not in endless meetings.”

Hawley’s research involves studying the cell-dividing processes that make sperm and eggs. He had a book, three national articles and four commentaries published last year.

Neaves said he expected Stowers to form strong partnerships in future years with researchers at Kansas University and UMKC.

University collaborations

A handful of collaborations with Stowers are under way with the KU Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., but none has started yet on the Lawrence campus, said Jim Roberts, interim vice provost for research at KU.

“It’s still early in the game,” Roberts said.

As Stowers works to fill up its first campus, leaders are looking toward the institute’s future. They have said they want to build a second facility, but without an increase in research funds at Kansas and Missouri universities, they may look at their options outside Kansas City.

Preliminary plans call for a 1 million-square-foot facility that would be constructed in fourths and house 900 employees. Bob Marcusse, president of the Kansas City Area Development Council, said the economic impact would be about $1.4 billion for the Kansas City area, according to a consultant’s report.

Kansas legislators are expected to consider a plan to pump millions into KU and Kansas State University research. It would take any growth in tax dollars from life science firms and put it into research programs at the two universities.

Sponsor Rep. Kenny Wilk, R-Lansing, hasn’t provided details of how much the proposal would provide. But Marcusse said a report that looked at Kansas City and Johnson County firms projected $260 million over 10 years.

Neaves said that would help toward what he called the needed “substantial investment in discovery research” at the universities, which would support Stowers programs.

“What little I know about the effort I find gratifying and exciting,” he said. “It will strengthen funding for researchers and life science research. The ability of KU to add more excellent research faculty to the university makes the situation here more favorable.”