Dog lovers know the look a canine can give, open-eyed, staring at your soul, and we often interpret it based on how we feel about a situation.
Michael Friedlander saw it in his labradoodle, Grayton, as he lay next to his human’s desk in 2010, during their first days in Roanoke. Friedlander had brought his family from Houston to the Star City to launch what would become Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion.
They were alone in the beginning.
“Those first few days I was sitting here with my dog in the office, and he’d sort of look at me like, ‘What are we doing here?’ A few times I’d say, ‘What have I done?’” said Friedlander, who was Baylor College of Medicine’s neuroscience chair and director of neuroscience initiatives before coming to Roanoke.
“I came literally from the biggest medical center in the world, Texas Medical Center, to what really was the smallest medical center in the world, a new one that didn’t exist yet. So it was an interesting contrast.”
That feeling changed quickly. In the 15 years since, about 700 people — including faculty, researchers, students and staff — have joined him. FBRI features 45 faculty-led research teams dealing with cancer, neuroscience and cardiometabolic health.
The institute’s recent investment in new laboratories at Children’s National Research and Innovation Campus in Washington has added about 30 people to its roster.
FBRI teams manage more than $50 million in active grant and contract funding annually, with more than $240 million in their active portfolios, Friedlander wrote in a recent Virginia Tech newsletter.
That translates beyond the institute’s building off South Jefferson Street. Friedlander noted in the newsletter that the institute has generated more than $1.7 billion in local economic impact in those 15 years, $190 million in just the last year. FBRI calculates that impact from annual expenditures, with each dollar spent equal to $2.50 in local impact, based on a standardized measure.
Some of that impact comes from employee paychecks. The average income is $67,000 a year for all employees. Salaried employees there average $105,000 annually, according to the institute. The Roanoke metropolitan statistical area’s individual income averages about $54,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Nowadays, the institute — which Friedlander noted in the newsletter has fostered at least 10 biotechnology startups and drawn about $2 million in small business grants — is a technology and economic development showcase, regional officials said.
“I think another level to it is that the prestige of the research being done at FBRI really elevates our region as a whole to the outside world,” said Bradley Boettcher, Roanoke’s innovation administrator.
He recently gave a Roanoke biotech tour to Angela Gill Nelms, director at Atlanta-based Biolocity, a life-science technology incubator for companies from Emory University and Georgia Tech. Nelms’ tour included a conversation with FBRI’s Hal Irvin, whose Virginia Tech portfolio includes getting research from the lab bench to commercialization.
They visited Carilion Clinic’s Center for Human Factors and the incubator laboratories under construction in a former Carilion Clinic building on South Jefferson Street. She found what she called an “absolutely gorgeous institute” that is “set up for success.”
“As soon as I arrived and started walking through [FBRI], I think what really stood out to me is, first off, it’s clearly state of the art,” Nelms said. “I mean it was amazing.”
John Hull, the Roanoke Regional Partnership’s executive director, gives his share of tours, as well. Among those who have at least ridden through the heart of what Hull called the “innovation corridor” was a team from Google, which in June announced that it bought land in Botetourt County for a proposed data center.
“FBRI and the entire innovation corridor represent this tremendous economic diversification for the region, you know, and a demonstration of what’s possible,” Hull said. “I think probably folks don’t know this: just about everyone who we bring into town, whether it be site selection consultants or even industry looking to locate here, we tell the story of the innovation corridor and what’s been done down there, because it demonstrates what this market is capable of from a talent attraction standpoint and from supporting … specifically in this case, life sciences and research and development …
“It’s a perfect case study.”
From potential to a ‘spectacular’ start
Roanoke-based businessman and philanthropist Heywood Fralin saw the potential from what was originally called Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. In 2018, Fralin, his wife, Cynthia, and his late brother’s namesake, Horace C. Fralin Charitable Trust, donated $50 million for the biomedical research institute.
FBRI, combined with research partner the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and the Carilion Taubman Cancer Center — under construction and neighboring the other two facilities at Riverside Center — will give the city a “true academic health center” that “could be one of the best in the world,” Fralin said.
“The start has been pretty spectacular,” he said.
Fralin has credited the late Del. Lacey Putney, an independent from Bedford County who chaired the House Appropriations Committee, for championing the Virginia Tech and Carilion projects in 2008, standing up to have them budgeted when others outside the region opposed it, Fralin said.
Putney was carrying forward concepts that Tech’s president at the time, Charles Steger, and Carilion’s then-CEO, Ed Murphy, had brainstormed. Fralin and Friedlander agree that Steger and Murphy were essential to sparking the academic health center, and their successors, Virginia Tech President Tim Sands and recently retired Carilion President and CEO Nancy Agee, continued to foster the project and the work done there since its fruition.
Steger and Murphy both retired after Friedlander’s arrival, and both have since died.
“I have to admit, I was a little anxious after all the exciting visionary discussions with President Steger and with Dr. Murphy,” Friedlander said. “But the good news is they [Sands and Agee] really embraced the vision and, and actually even upped the game further.”
If their support was crucial, Friedlander’s continuing role remains essential, Fralin said.
“Mike Friedlander is as good as they come in developing an academic health center,” he said.
Turns out, Friedlander brought a secret ingredient for success with him from Houston.
Building a culture, family-style
FBRI has connected itself to both the region and the broader scientific community, while also building a family-style culture in the building.
Friedlander credits his wife, Sandra, with helping build that culture — not as an employee, simply as support for her husband.
“She’s probably the most important part of my recruiting enterprise,” he said. “I recruit individuals, but they usually come with families, not always but usually, and there’s usually a partner, and there may be kids. And so we’re not just selling the research institute and all the great facilities, we kind of sell the community.
“Sandra didn’t know Roanoke any better than I did, but she very quickly engaged and became quite a community salesman. I can’t tell you how many deals we closed, where she was with the partner and making sure, connecting the kids, the schools and activities, and I mean, just all the things. It’s kind of a family affair.”
One of Friedlander’s earliest hires, Stephen LaConte, has seen it firsthand. LaConte, now 51, is a neuroscientist and interim co-director of FBRI’s Addiction Recovery Research Center. He came along with his wife, Leslie LaConte, a biochemist who is associate dean for educational affairs at the medical school. The Friedlanders and LaContes knew each other from Houston, where Stephen was an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine.
“Sandra is terrific,” Stephen LaConte said. “She’s a force of nature. And so the two of them together are awesome. … I had never met someone who recruited and made an incoming faculty member feel as valued as Mike did. He’s taken that to the next level here and been very successful in recruiting world class researchers. The two of them together are very active in all facets of the community.”
LaConte thought that he would be in Houston for decades before the Friedlanders — with an assist from another early FBRI arrival from Baylor, computational neuroscientist Read Montague — lured his family to Roanoke. The work and recreational opportunities have kept them here, he said.
Traffic jams, or lack thereof, play a big role, too.
“You have more time,” he said. “You can work harder but actually still have time for your family, because traffic is not what it is in Houston. There are lots of activities that are going on, and even if they’re in another city, like in Salem, you can get there. …
“The quality of life, the quality of the air, all of the outdoor activities, you know, canoeing down the James, all those sorts of things have enriched my family life.”
The Houston-to-Roanoke neuroscience pipeline continues. Meike van der Heijden (pronounced Micah Vonder Hiden), 35, came to FBRI in February 2024, after finishing her postdoctoral fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine. Her husband, whom she met in Houston, was thrilled to move to Roanoke, because he is an avid cyclist. Van der Heijden, a Netherlands native, has a road bike, too, but prefers hikes that include their 15-month-old daughter.
“We take her in our hiking backpack and go explore,” van der Heijden said. “So I think it’s a lot of the outdoors that has really pulled us. We love it here.”
Van der Heijden’s daughter and one of the LaContes’ three children were born in the Roanoke and New River valleys. Multiple married couples work at both the institute and school of medicine. Among them are Brooks Casas, the first researcher on board at FBRI, and his wife, Pearl Chiu, who joined the institute’s faculty a few months later.
Friedlander said that FBRI employees share pictures of all the recent babies, by birth and adoption, at each annual seasonal celebration.
“I have lost track of the total number of new babies over the years but I’m sure it’s easily over 50,” he said in an email exchange. “In addition, we share pics of newly adopted critters, mostly furry types — AKA canines and felines — but also non-mammalian types including reptiles and birds.”
From the lab to the world
Not that there isn’t a lot of work to do. That research opportunity was the big draw to Roanoke, van der Heijden said. Her lab focuses predominantly on development of the cerebellum, a brain region situated at the back of the brain.
Many neurons have yet to populate a newborn baby’s cerebellum, which develops over a long time. That allows researchers to track how its development aligns with behavior acquisition, van der Heijden said. That region is key for fine motor control, along with movements and balance.
“So that’s why babies cannot walk yet, and they cannot even grab anything or roll over yet,” she said. “But it’s also very important for cognitive functions, including language, social interactions, emotional control, all of that.”
Her lab studies how the brain is put together and how it affects behavior, including what changes when it’s not put together correctly. The work is relevant to pediatric neurological conditions including autism spectrum disorder and movement disorders including dystonia.
For people with dystonia, muscles work against each other and cause stiff posturing or repetitive movements. Dystonia is common to people with Parkinson’s disease and people with tremors. Among the better known examples is voice dystonia, in which muscle spasms cause an affected person to speak haltingly, shakily and with a rasp.
LaConte and his lab members focus on an innovation they developed for functional magnetic resonance imaging, called fMRI. They dubbed their innovation “temporally adaptive brain state” — TABS fMRI for short.
“I would say we often distill a movie of the brain in action into sort of statistical pictures to understand what parts of the brain are changing or involved in different tasks that we give people in the scanner,” he said. “A structural scan is usually the one that we see in the publications, a beautiful high-resolution image of the brain. But the underlying statistics come from ugly pictures of the brain that are taken at faster rates. … Like in our case, we’re looking at blood flow that’s supporting brain function.”
He took the Addiction Recovery Research Center co-leadership role after the death last year of his longtime friend and colleague, Warren Bickel. LaConte, Bickel and others have co-authored papers centered on “episodic future thinking,” or EFT, as a way for addicts to decrease alcohol dependency. EFT capitalizes on our ability to visualize things that might happen as a way to help make better decisions when situations arise.
Like all FBRI faculty, LaConte holds a tenure track appointment with a Virginia Tech department. His is in biomedical engineering and mechanics with the College of Engineering.
“I have a very close connection with biomedical engineering,” said LaConte, who has a bachelor’s in electrical engineering along with a doctorate in biomedical engineering. “ I … insisted on having an [introductory] undergraduate course that teaches the physics of medical imaging. … So when we were planning out the curriculum, I knew I was sort of dooming myself to give lectures on MRI, but I felt like it was an important opportunity to give to the undergrads to learn about different medical imaging methods from an engineering perspective.”
Van der Heijden is an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s neuroscience department. Faculty members often work closely with medical students and even get VT undergrads in their labs for experiential learning.
“We often think of research as this scientific enterprise that just does new discoveries,” she said. “But it’s also very much a training environment, and we do a lot of different types of training which I think is really unique, in that it’s grad students and postdocs and medical students and undergrads.
“I think that I haven’t seen a lot of places where all of that is facilitated as smoothly as it is here.”
She added: “I think it really brings a depth to your research program to be able to work with a lot of different types of students.”
Friedlander is at least as busy as anyone else in the building. He is Virginia Tech’s vice president for health sciences and technology and is senior dean for research at the school of medicine. Only recently, he has begun to wind down his own FBRI neuroscience lab with some final papers. He had been doing about 90% administrating and 10% research work during his many 18-hour days.
“It’s a full-time job running the institute and doing all the exciting things we’re doing, building our new patient research center and recruiting people and building our program with Children’s National [Hospital] and working on the cell and gene therapy program. We got so much going here, but yeah, it’s more than more than a full-time job, so I’ve got to pay complete attention to all that.”
There are plenty of other neuroscientists around, after all. Heart, cancer and childhood disease research have become big parts of FBRI over the years, but Friedlander acknowledged that brain research is the institute’s biggest strength. Montague, LaConte and other Baylor connections he knew were important to the foundation, and several remain.
“And it’s no surprise, because that’s what I do for a living,” he said. “When I came here, I told the leadership, look, if you hire me, even though we want to cover multiple areas in biomedical and health science research, one of the first ones I’m going to dive into and I want to see real strength is the one I know the best. … So that is the first area we built up.”
Those early hires were more than simply talented scientists. They were the types to take new approaches to both research and academics, and people noticed, Friedlander said.
“We got some really, really good people in those first couple years, superstars,” he said. “And that builds on itself, and other people see that, and you can attract younger researchers that come here when they see the other kinds of people that are here. So it’s kind of spiraling on itself in a positive way.”
With the researchers came results. Focused ultrasound is used not to view pregnant mothers’ progress but to treat Parkinson’s disease and brain tumors, a paper by the institute’s Wynn Legon and William “Bill” Tyler showed. These days, the Focused Ultrasound Foundation Center recognizes FBRI as among the Virginia Tech departments forming a center of excellence, a designation based on an institute’s quality of clinical research and its translation to real world use, along with training and patient care, according to its website.
Craig Ramey in 2011 brought to FBRI the Abecedarian Project that he helped pioneer decades ago at the University of North Carolina. He and a team that includes his wife and FBRI colleague, Sharon Ramey, continued work with a single group of subjects on a project demonstrating that at-risk children who received early education and nutrition in their first five years had greater success across a range of metrics including education, employment, home ownership and family relations.
Montague and his lab, working with an international team at Wake Forest University, recently inserted custom-built microsensors in willing patients’ brains, then used a high-speed scanning device to record dopamine and serotonin fluctuations as the subjects played a specially designed computer game. It was a first, and showed how the chemicals shape perception and spark action, Virginia Tech reported.
The future will include disagreements about federal funding
Employee numbers will be expanding soon, with the new Virginia Tech Patient Research Center coming online, to be housed within FBRI.
Faculty and teams at the center will perform clinical patient-based research to validate discoveries in neuroscience, cardiovascular science and cancer through the next phases of clinical research, FBRI spokesman John Pastor wrote in an email exchange.
Friedlander said that the hiring process is underway and he expects to have at least two candidates ready to start work no later than spring 2026. Those leaders will then hire even more employees.
Meanwhile, Virginia Tech’s Translational Biology, Medicine and Health program for post-graduate students is in its 11th year.
Even as the institute grows, concerns loom.
The Trump administration’s National Institutes of Health has attempted deep cuts to research institutes for so-called facilities and administration costs such as laboratory maintenance, high-speed data processing, data storage and security, lab equipment, radiation safety, hazardous waste disposal and support staff for administrative and regulatory compliance work.
Multiple states’ attorneys general and lawyers for academic groups received a temporary restraining order against the NIH and its overseer agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. The NIH has appealed that restraining order, in a case still pending in a Massachusetts federal court.
A spokesman for Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in February that it is “common sense” to make sure that taxpayer-funded grants apply to research and not administrative overhead. U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, said in February that he does not believe that lower indirect cost rates “will significantly impact NIH-funded institutions in the Ninth District.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget plan calls for further cuts to the NIH budget and across Health and Human Services, though it seems to have sparked some bipartisan resistance in Congress.
The Senate Appropriations Committee included language in its Labor, Health and Human Services bill for the 2026 fiscal year that would prohibit Trump from changing the cost rate for facilities and administration, also known as indirect costs. The language essentially restates a prohibition that Congress placed on Trump during his first administration.
Virginia Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner joined their Democratic colleagues in a February letter to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying that the administration’s attempted cuts “threaten to undermine progress on lifesaving scientific advancements, could cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars, and threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers” nationwide.
Kaine said on Friday that he will continue the battle against cutting indirect funds. The changes could have a $13 million impact on Virginia Tech’s research budget, much of which goes to FBRI, university President Tim Sands has said.
“I’ve heard from Virginia research institutes about how the Trump Administration’s decision to cap indirect costs for NIH funding undermines lifesaving research into cancer treatment, chronic disease prevention, and other health conditions, and I’ve worked with my colleagues to push back against these cuts,” Kaine said through a spokeswoman on Friday. “I’m glad that there continues to be a bipartisan commitment in the Senate to support our biomedical research institutions and reaffirm that the Trump Administration does not have the authority to singlehandedly make these cuts.”
Griffith, in a statement through his spokesman on Friday, said he supports FBRI’s work.
“The NIH is given money by Congress to do medical research and make decisions on research projects,” his statement read. “Congress sometimes will give directions as to where they would like to see additional research, but does not typically designate the institution to receive federal grant dollars. That is the responsibility of the NIH.”
While the NIH funds much of the institute’s work, state money has flowed there as well.
The commonwealth’s latest biennial budget provides $26.5 million to support the Patient Research Center’s launch. Another $4 million is coming via the state’s equipment trust fund, according to Pastor. That money, part of Youngkin’s budget proposal, is part of a $90 million plan from 2023 that the governor called “Virginia’s Research Triangle Initiative,” which included the University of Virginia’s Manning Institute for Biotechnology and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medicines for All Institute.
A Youngkin spokesman did not reply to messages seeking comment on FBRI’s milestone year and its growth.
Del. Sam Rasoul, a Democrat whose Roanoke district includes FBRI and the rest of Riverside Center, said that funding the institute has been a bipartisan process.
“We’ve been proud of all the work that the institute has been doing and have been part of a cohort that has put forward large budget amendments to ensure that we could fund the growth and development of the research institute in becoming a world class place for brain research as we move forward,” Rasoul said.
Existing grants may also play a part in the Patient Research Center’s work.
“Some of the work the investigators there will be doing is going to be funded by partnerships with industry as well, such as clinical trials, so it’s a more, I’d say, diverse portfolio than our standard researchers, who rely almost exclusively on NIH,” Friedlander said. “So because they have a more diverse portfolio we think those sorts of programs are less at risk right now.”
Elsewhere in the institute, administrators are being “very careful” with planned expenditures and being “more conservative” than in the past, he said.
NIH funding isn’t going away entirely, he said, and there will be further discussions and debates around potential cuts.
“But you know, when you surround yourself with the kind of talent that we have, and we will continue to do, we are betting on and have a good level of confidence that these people will continue to be successful even in what is a more competitive environment,” Friedlander said. “No doubt about it, it will be more competitive.”
Rasoul said that the General Assembly will have a role to play in the federal fight, as well.
“Obviously, this world-class research is helping to save lives and come up with innovative designs as we move forward,” he said. “And the reality is we all need to put pressure on the federal government as they’re negotiating the budget going into next year, to not undercut this important research and development that is happening here.
“And that includes that state officials will continue to do our part in helping” fund the institute.
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