Making Brain Waves

By Andy Meek | The Daily News | Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Ten leading scientists to help chart course for musculoskeletal institute.

Richard Tarr, in the words of one of Memphis' most influential entrepreneurs, is "the Tiger Woods of orthopedics."

Tarr is executive director and president of InMotion Musculoskeletal Institute, which is a nonprofit laboratory on the cutting edge of medical research in Memphis. The words of praise come from former Sofamor Danek executive Robert Compton, who's as vocal a supporter as they come for Memphis' emergence as a hub of the musculoskeletal industry.

One of the reasons he considers Tarr a dynamo in the field is Tarr's knack for attracting top talent to Memphis. Here's one example: To brainstorm ideas for the scientific direction InMotion should be taking, Tarr recently called 10 of the top players in orthopedics about joining a new committee at InMotion.

All of them said yes, which means that on Nov. 28, InMotion will convene in Memphis its first-ever Scientific Advisory Committee.

That, in turn, will bring some valuable horsepower to InMotion's efforts and continue to illuminate Memphis on the radar screen of the orthopedics industry.

Brain-picking time

And it reinforces the value of having an industry veteran in Memphis like Tarr, who brings a wealth of knowledge and a bulging Rolodex to a city where stakeholders are angling to build a bioscience industry from the ground up.

First and foremost, the implications of next month's meeting are hard to miss.

"I think that the great thing about this is the opportunity to get that many smart people who are world-class here, thinking about research in Memphis," said Compton, who serves on the boards of the Plough Foundation and the Campbell Orthopedic Research Foundation.

The committee meeting, which will be held at the Madison Hotel, Downtown, reflects Tarr's desire to mold a group that will advise the Institute on research, funding opportunities and more.

Nine of the 10 experts Tarr invited are planning to come; Dr. Cecil Rorabeck, professor of surgery for the University of Western Ontario, was already committed to a prior speaking engagement. The meeting also follows InMotion's final quarterly musculoskeletal lecture of 2006.

That lecture will be held at the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis the day before the committee meeting at the Madison. It will feature Dr. Joshua Jacobs, the professor, associate chairman and director of Midwest Orthopedics at Rush University Medical Center of Illinois.

Incidentally, Jacobs - also the current president of the Illinois-based Orthopedic Research Society - is one of the 10 experts Tarr recruited for the new InMotion committee.

"The real focus of this group, the real reason I put it in place, is I really needed a strong scientific group to make sure I'm on track and I'm doing the things that we need to do in musculoskeletal research," Tarr said.

Planting seeds

InMotion is well under way in the construction of its facility and laboratory space at 20 South Dudley St.

So also on Nov. 28, the plan is to have committee members tour the space and get a feel for what's to come. They'll also fan out to visit other sites in the Memphis Medical District.

InMotion is still on track to move into its lab space in January. To that end, the group also is recruiting clinician scientists through a joint appointment with the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Campbell Clinic and the University of Memphis Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Other milestones soon will be reached for InMotion. Besides the lab space, the Institute is launching a Web site this month at http://www.inmotionmemphis.org.

"The Scientific Advisory Committee is such a great opportunity for us," Tarr said. "To put this group together, I actually just made 10 calls to people that I knew, people who were at a really high level in the orthopedic community. A number of them are orthopedic surgeons, department chairmen and top-level clinician scientists."

Initiatives like that and others are examples of why encouraging Tarr to move from Warsaw, Ind. - which long has been the king of the hill in the multi-billion dollar industry - was a coup for Memphis.

Big piece of turf

Three large-scale medical device companies in Memphis join dozens of smaller companies that collectively are responsible for more than 15 percent of the national industry's $20 billion in sales.

So Memphis already occupies a big part of the playing field in orthopedics. Combined with Tarr's presence and his ability to organize events such as next month's committee meeting, the result is what Compton and others say they hope is an unbeatable winning streak for the city in terms of economic growth and job creation.

"I'm very enthusiastic and optimistic about the work that Dick is doing," Compton said. "And this is a remarkable scientific advisory board.

"I think what's important to InMotion and to the Memphis community is that the scientists that Dick has assembled are world-class talents, and so the fact they're all coming to Memphis and thinking about and giving advice on how to foster cutting edge musculoskeletal research in Memphis - that's a lot of momentum than can be applied to opportunities in our community."