Justin Richardson, a lifeguard, knew the delights and dangers of a pool's cool, indigo depths.

But Richardson, an accomplished swimmer, didn't envision he'd become a diving statistic when he took a 6-foot leap into a friend's pool on the night of Aug. 10, 2003.

"I was trying to do a shallow dive, like I knew to do," Richardson, a 24-year-old North Carolina State University junior, said recently from his home in Wendell, N.C. "I was a competitive swimmer, but I just didn't look."

He hit the stairs and bruised his spine where his neck meets his shoulders. The accident left him with limited use of his hands and arms and no feeling from his chest down.

Today, after undergoing an experimental procedure in which Israeli surgeons injected a type of white blood cells into his spinal cord to help repair damaged nerves and tissue, Richardson says he's regained about 95 percent control of his arms and hands. Although he remains in a wheelchair, he has regained the ability to feel a dull sensation throughout his lower body.

Proneuron Biotechnologies, the Israeli company that developed the surgical method, soon will start a second phase of its trial, this time in the United States. Proneuron is partnering with several U.S. companies, including Cell Dynamics, a Smyrna-based tissue and cell processor. The Shepherd Center, an Atlanta hospital that is a leader in the South for treating spinal cord and brain injuries, also is a partner in the project.

If Phase II and Phase III of the trial are as promising as Richardson's experience in Phase I, and it passes a battery of reviews from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the procedure could be a significant milestone in the treatment of spinal cord injuries.

It also would be an important step forward for the business, political and university leaders pushing Georgia's fledgling bioscience community, which industry experts say lags that of more established centers in the Northeast and on the West Coast.

Georgia boasts top-notch bioscience research institutions, including Georgia Tech, Emory University and the University of Georgia. The state also is home to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Unlike Boston, San Francisco, San Diego and North Carolina's Research Triangle, bioscience leaders that began fostering such business years ago, metro Atlanta hasn't developed much of a reputation in the industry.

Instead, in the 1980s and '90s, the business community here staked its fortune on telecommunications, software and other computer-related industries.

As those industries waned or shipped operations overseas, state officials and some of Georgia's leading corporate and university leaders started working to develop a biosciences center.

The Proneuron project, which received a $3.16 million grant from Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus' foundation, is just one example that city and state efforts are beginning to have an effect, proponents say.

They say bioscience companies will create jobs, increase the pool of local talent and help position the state to attract large drug firms like Merck & Co. The pharmaceutical giant is building a vaccine plant in Durham, N.C., that is expected to employ 200 by 2009 and pay an average annual salary of $57,000. Merck considered Georgia but chose North Carolina because it has a much larger base of bioscience firms and pool of professional workers.

In numbers of bioscience firms, Georgia ranks 11th among states and Canadian provinces in North America, according to Ernst & Young's 2004 Global Biotechnology Report.

"It's getting there, but it's not robust yet," Wayne Clough, Georgia Tech's president, said at a recent board meeting of the Georgia Research Alliance.

The GRA, formed in 1990, seeks to raise the state's bioscience profile by recruiting scientists in disciplines including AIDS, cancer research, agricultural biotechnology and biomedical engineering.

To date, the GRA, whose board members hail from some of Georgia's marquee corporations, including BellSouth, Synovus Financial Corp. and United Parcel Service, has recruited some 50 scientists and drawn more than $1.3 billion in federal and state tax dollars and private funding for research.

All told, those research projects in biosciences and advanced communications technology have created 1,500 direct jobs, support an additional 28,000 jobs statewide and indirectly funnel an estimated $2 billion through Georgia's economy, according to the alliance.

Spinning out that research into thriving businesses — the other part of GRA's efforts — has been harder.

In part, that's because Georgia hasn't viewed bioscience as an economic development engine the way it has manufacturing plants, say people in the bioscience and economic development communities.

The state's incentives packages are primarily tailored to large-scale operations, such as an auto plant, and aren't necessarily applicable to start-ups like Cell Dynamics.

The 4-year-old company is spending $750,000 to construct a laboratory for the Proneuron project. But it doesn't qualify for state assistance because it has fewer than 25 employees.

"The state is slow and a little bit behind in its incentives program," said Robert McNally, a Cell Dynamics founder and the company's chief executive officer.

Faced with the real threat that some of these university research projects might evolve into businesses that set up shop — and create jobs — in other states, Georgia is responding.

"The understanding is improving," said Michael Cassidy, GRA president. "We have a governor that's keen on building this from the ground up."

The state created the Life Sciences Facilities Fund last year to help bioscience companies just starting out. A private-public partnership of the GRA and the Georgia Department of Economic Development, the fund lends money to start-ups.

In return, the state receives equity in the companies, which also must repay the loans.

"Those types of companies get to a point where they're not yet bankable, and it's hard for them to get a loan," said Chris Clark, the agency's deputy commissioner of public affairs and policy.

Alpharetta-based Inhibitex, a biopharmaceutical firm that is in early phases of testing treatments to combat bacterial and fungal infections, received $2.5 million to finance a laboratory.

This month, Gov. Sonny Perdue created the Strategic Industries Loan Fund to help counties attract companies in target industries such as bioscience. "Are we where we want to be? No," Clark said. "But are we farther along than we were 12 months ago? Absolutely."

Head start for rivals

For Georgia to become a serious rival to places like California and North Carolina's Research Triangle, it will take time, experts say.

And a lot of money.

Many of those places had decades long head starts and have state backing, investment capital and — most crucial — the mass of people in the biosciences industry needed to sustain growth.

"The issue is management," said Russell French of Noro-Moseley Partners, an Atlanta-based venture capital firm. "That management pool is not as deep here as it is in other places, because there's not that many examples of successes that draw entrepreneurs here."

Bioscience firms have a long time line — most notably, getting FDA approval — before an idea goes from a thought to a product for sale.

All that time in between requires a constant stream of funding.

"You don't have 25 major successes that cause people to get out of their warm bed somewhere at Emory or Georgia Tech and jump into the entrepreneurial side of biosciences," French said of Georgia's bioscience industry. "Success breeds the courage to try it yourself."

Success also brings in more investment capital.

Georgia's bioscience industry garnered $27 million in venture capital in the second quarter of this year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. That compares with the $47 million that software, information technology and semiconductor firms in Georgia netted during the same period.

For the first half of the year, the state had two bioscience investment deals, compared with 26 such deals in Massachusetts and 51 in California, worth $437 million and $662 million, respectively, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

"There is a factor of critical mass that I think every state has got to address," said Kirk Walden, a PricewaterhouseCoopers analyst. "That comes into play for any industry but in particular the biomedical industry, which has these longer-term horizons."

Israeli connection

"We're seeing lots of interesting companies in the pipeline like Proneuron," said Tom Glaser, president of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce's Southeast region. The chamber helped broker the deal for Cell Dynamics, Proneuron and the Shepherd Center.

Israeli bioscience firms have increased their interest in Georgia as a viable center for bioscience business, Glaser said. "They've recognized how serious we are, even though Georgia is not considered one of the top three or four centers for this kind of activity."

Since May, Shepherd has been recruiting patients for the second phase of the trial. Though only 40 are needed, the hospital has fielded hundreds of calls from all over the country, Central America and South America. Shepherd has drawn more patients as a result, said Michael Jones, the Shepherd Center's vice president of research

"Frankly, anything we do in the cellular therapy arena will have a huge impact on the general population," he said. "It's really an exciting time."

Richardson, who suffered the diving accident last year, said he's not holding high expectations for a full recovery. Still, he acknowledges, the research and resulting surgery has given him a life that would not have been possible 10 years ago.

"At the time of my injury, I went from being totally self-sufficient to having someone feed me and take me to the bathroom," Richardson said.

"To have my independence back, it's more than I could ask for."

PRONEURON'S PROJECT
Unlike most of the human body, human spinal cords don't have the ability for significant wound repair. Proneuron, based in Israel and partnering with several cell processing centers and hospitals in the United States, including in metro Atlanta, is in the trial phases of a procedure that could be a significant step in the treatment of spinal cord injuries.
The procedure calls for a 2-by-3-inch skin graft of the injured person's inner bicep. That graft is then cultured to produce a type of white blood cell, called a macrophage. These macrophages are then injected six times into the spinal column, just below the site of injury.