When construction is completed at ALK-Abelló Source Materials, Inc.'s new $30 million facility in Post Falls, Idaho, it will be the world's largest raw allergen material production facility, at 68,000 square feet. Production is scheduled to begin in 2009.
This manufacturing plant is part of a biosciences sector that continues to march forward despite the shaky economy. From locations such as Lee County, N.C., to Marshfield, Wis., to Georgetown, Texas, to inland coastal communities in California and Florida, the biosciences industry is positioned for the future. In fact, in December, Industrial Info Resources reported that the biotech and pharma industries will see an investment of $21 billion this year, which will be spread across 537 projects set to begin construction.
From Post Falls, ALK-Abelló Source Materials will be able to retain its Spokane, Wash., area employees, as the community is only 22 miles east of Spokane. The company will consolidate the production and development of allergen raw materials currently conducted at five sites in and around Spokane at the new facility.
The company, formerly known as Biopol Laboratory, Inc., has sites in Pennsylvania, Washington and Idaho. On Jan. 1, Biopol merged with Vespa Laboratories, Inc. and changed its name to ALK-Abelló Source Materials. The products finished in Idaho will be delivered to manufacturing sites in New York, Spain, Denmark and France, where they will be used to manufacture allergy diagnostic and therapeutic products. The company's products are produced from natural biological sources and include pollens, dust mites, foods and other allergens — just about everything that can cause allergic patients to wheeze and sneeze, writes Miles Guralnick, president, ALK-Abelló Source Materials, in an e-mail correspondence.
The company controls a 600-acre farm in Plummer, Idaho, where it grows a variety of grasses and other plants to produce pollens used as raw materials for allergy immunotherapy products. Allergy immunotherapy is traditionally administered as subcutaneous injections; the company is introducing tablet-based immunotherapy.
Guralnick says the Post Falls facility, being built on a 12.5 site in Riverbend Commerce Park, offers the company a geographic labor pool that encompasses both eastern Washington and northern Idaho. “There are also eight colleges and universities in the region producing a large number of well educated candidates,” Guralnick notes.
The biosciences company's officials have found the outreach from the state, regional and local officials to be extraordinary. “Steven Griffitts, president, Jobs Plus and the Coeur d'Alene Economic Development Corp. has been the ‘hub,'” Guralnick writes. “His help has been instrumental in opening up all of the doors … orchestrating immediate high priority access to every relevant contact person at every agency, organization, municipality, service provider, etc., who could help us with the planning and execution of our project.”
The eastern Washington and northern Idaho region, referred to as the Inland Northwest, is home to a knowledge-rich corridor for bioscience companies to tap into. Universities in the area include Washington State University in Pullman, and the University of Idaho in Moscow. The region is home to burgeoning biotech firms, including Amplicon Express, a molecular biology service company with expert scientists in genome research and protein characterization; and Anatek Labs, a full-service, multi-state certified analytical lab providing agricultural, residential and industrial testing services.
In Spokane, the well-established Hollister-Stier Laboratories, has been acquired by Jubilant Organosys Ltd., a global custom research and manufacturing services firm, headquartered in India. Hollister-Stier manufactures allergenic extracts, and features a contract pharma manufacturing operation.
Idyllic Smaller Markets
A small town in North Carolina is home to a large expansion by Wyeth Biotech, a manufacturer of pediatric vaccine components, which has begun construction on a $50 million administration building in Lee County. The building will provide permanent space for Wyeth's rapidly expanding operation, which is driven by the worldwide success of Prevnar, which offers seven vaccines in one dose. The rapid growth has caused the company to house many employees in trailers. The new 170,000-square-foot facility, which is expected to be completed in the first quarter of next year, will provide space for 600 employees working in administration, engineering, quality control, human resources, training and accounting. About 1,400 employees currently work at Wyeth in Sanford at this time.
Another small town that is well suited to support the biosciences industry is Marshfield, Wis. The new building for the Laird Center for Medical Research will open this summer, where the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation's Biomedical Informatics Research Center will be the first organization to move in, taking 8,000 square feet. The new center will bring together clinical lab work and research conducted at the Marshfield Clinic in one facility. In addition to the bioinformatics center, two additional research groups will be housed in the 112,000-square-foot facility: the Center for Human Genetics; and the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases.
As the Marshfield Clinic continues to grow it remains in Marshfield to leverage the relationship the clinic has built with the community, says Dr. Justin Starren, director, Marshfield Clinic's Biomedical Informatics Research Center. “If you look at the NIH's roadmap of initiatives, one of the major ones is translational medicine, the whole idea of moving discoveries from the lab into practice more quickly,” Starren says. “By being closely tied with a large, highly integrated care system, we are in a position to do that.”
In regard to collaboration opportunities at the Marshfield Clinic, last year, officials entered into an agreement with WISys, which is the organization that handles all of the intellectual property for the University of Wisconsin network. The majority of the clinic's intellectual property to date has been in the molecular diagnostics area.
“The advantage for companies of WISys is that they have a single point of contact for intellectual property for all of the University of Wisconsin campuses, one set of agreements, one set of lawyers, so they can integrate technologies more efficiently,” Starren says.
In addition, the Marshfield Clinic features an applied sciences group, which has a mandate of the conversion of technologies developed at the clinic into commercial products, which includes internal incubators as well as working with companies to license the technologies.
When Starren discusses the advantages of doing business from Marshfield he says this part of the country features great schools, where Marshfield High School consistently ranks No. 2 in the state in terms of overall academic quality; affordable housing; short commutes; a safe environment for kids; a place where researchers can still conduct world-class research.
The outstanding quality of life is also a value-added proposition for biosciences companies considering Georgetown, Texas, which is home to the Texas Life-Sciences Commercialization Center, which opened last fall. The center supports post-incubation companies, those that are emerging as viable commercial entities, to take root.
“We find that emerging technology companies typically consist of a younger generation of people who want to live in areas with a good quality of life,” says Russ Peterman, executive director, Texas Life-Sciences Commercialization Center. “Georgetown has a statewide reputation for a high quality of life, with good schools, reasonable housing prices and lots of open areas for recreation.”
Peterman says the center is specializing in a stage of development where these companies typically have five to 10 employees, which already have some form of capitalization, who need an inexpensive rent and shared common services, such as a traditional biotech wet lab, and a clean room for bio and nano technologies. A proteomics and genetics lab to include advanced equipment such as gene sequencing equipment is in the plans.
Founding partners at the center include Southwestern University, the city of Georgetown and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce. The 15,000-square-foot center is home to three tenants. The founding company that assisted in developing the center's concept is called Radix BioSolutions, which spun out of Luminex Corp., which is based in Austin. Radix develops custom assay kits for the platforms of Luminex.
Another tenant, Quantum Logic Devices, is building semiconductor-based assay kits and disease marker tests. “In the nanotech world, using transistor technologies, they are building devices that can detect markers for a number of diseases, and doing it fast and cheap,” Peterman says. “We expect the product will affect the cost of health care and provide the convenience of eliminating lab work for patients. You could find out if you have a cold or flu in five minutes for $5 dollars and not have to go to the doctor to get tests. It changes the paradigm of health care.”
The third tenant at the life sciences center is Orthopeutics, which is developing a product that is being licensed through the FDA as a medical device. The company has developed an injectable fluid to repair disc problems in the spine. The product, which is in clinical testing, could replace surgery on the back.
Peterman says the activities at the center focus on translational research that results in products that can be used at a patient's bedside in the near term. The area, 20 miles from Austin, is a rapidly growing region with a number of new hospital facilities and systems clustered around the area. Austin will be home to two medical schools, which are under construction by the University of Texas and the Texas A&M University system. “The Austin region has not had medical schools before and now we will have two of them located nearby,” Peterman says.
What's more, Austin is the home of one of the country's leading semiconductor manufacturing clusters, and much of the nanotech technologies are based around semiconductor technologies, Peterman notes.
Unbeatable Access
Riverside County, Calif., offers bioscience companies proximity to “Bio Beach” found in San Diego. The southwest part of Riverside County, Temecula, Murrieta, and Elsinore, offer advantages to companies in regard to lower costs for facilities. “Relatively speaking, we have low cost industrial land compared to the coastal communities,” says Richard Dozier, senior economic development specialist, Riverside County Economic Development Agency. “We are centrally located in the heart of the Inland Empire, and within minutes of Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.”
Dozier says it used to be that companies that wanted to service Southern California in the health care industry would operate from an office in Los Angeles County or Orange County to cover the entire region. “That is no longer true because the commutes no longer make it true,” Dozier says.
Riverside County features an educated but commuting technical workforce. “A lot of people live in the Inland Empire because they can get more house for their money, so they tend to commute outside of the county to the higher paying bio or medical-tech jobs,” Dozier says. “What companies have found is the population in the Inland Empire has grown so dramatically they can justify putting a sales office or other facilities in the inland to service that population and also to take advantage of the savings and the workforce, which does not want to commute to those beach counties to work everyday.”
Dozier says commuter surveys have found that 45 percent to 50 percent of the workforce commutes from Riverside County to other communities to work. The same surveys show that workers are willing to take a 10 percent to 15 percent reduction in salary just to work closer to home, which provides an advantage to a company that wants to locate in the Inland Empire because it gives them a ready workforce and a negotiating point for salaries.
Riverside County has been home to bio and medical science-related firms for more than 50 years, such as Abbott Vascular, Opto 22, Chemicon International and Boston Scientific, among others. Officials have recently identified more than 40 companies involved in either medical or biosciences activities in a triangle, a region bounded by Interstates 215, 15 and the 60 freeway, Dozier notes. The area offers a diversified base of companies that would be able to provide services and supplies to assist in growth.
Another community that benefits from its inland location, and which is in the middle of a biosciences triangle, is Highlands County, Fla. The community is surrounded by three institutes that will be locating and developing in Florida: Burnham Institute for Medical Research, Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies and Scripps Florida. There are strong partnerships and synergies that smaller firms might want to tap into.
What's more, the state of Florida is actively behind bioscience activities unfolding in Highlands County, as it is one of six counties that comprise the South Central RACEC (Rural Areas of Critical Economic Concern), which acts as a catalyst to create industry clusters in a region to build off large projects, such as a Scripps Florida. The South Central RACEC will look at biosciences, durable medical equipment and research activities.
“The Sebring Airport Industrial Park was selected as the premier site for the South Central RACEC,” says Louise England, executive director, Highlands County Economic Development Council. “Right now we are working on agreements among the counties to share resources that will come from these projects, such as the taxes.”
The county features a Foreign Trade Zone designation at the Sebring site so products can be imported, assembled and sent to other countries, England notes. “We would also be eligible for durable medical goods and stent manufacturing.”
Enterprise Florida, which markets the state as a business destination, will soon begin to market the RACEC's sites to the biosciences industry. In the meantime, the county's community college has partnered with other community colleges to begin developing biosciences programs.
As is the case with other communities across the country locating knowledge-based firms, the quality of life factor comes into play in Highlands County. England says the county offers the best of both worlds, the ability to live and work in a rural area, while having the ability to access 85 percent of the population of Florida within 150 miles. “Within an hour to an hour-and-a-half you can attend a play and access large cities' amenities and come home the same evening,” England says.
Bioscience companies will find that whether it is an emerging or established bioscience cluster, regional and local officials in the communities are poised to support their stages of growth.
For complete details about the organizations featured in this article, visit:
ALK-Abelló Source Materials, Inc., www.alk-abello.com
Highlands County (Fla.) Economic Development Council, www.highlandsedc.com
Lee County (N.C.) Economic Development Corp., www.lcedc.com.
Marshfield (Wis.) Clinic's Biomedical Informatics Research Center, www.marshfieldclinic.org/birc
Riverside County (Calif.) Economic Development Agency, www.rivcoeda.org
Texas Life-Sciences Commercialization Center, www.texaslifesciences.com
Biosciences
Based on number of establishments, first quarter 2006 to first quarter 2007.
Startups
1. California
2. Florida
3. Massachusetts
4. New York
5. Texas
6. Maryland (Tie)
6. New Jersey (tie)
8. Washington
9. North Carolina (tie)
9. Michigan (tie)
New Branches
1. California
2. Maryland
3. Pennsylvania
4. Texas
5. Massachusetts
6. Florida
7. Indiana (tie)
7. Virginia (tie)
9. Ohio
10. Missouri (tie)
10. New York (tie)
10. New Jersey (tie)
Employment
1. California
2. Pennsylvania
3. New York
4. Massachusetts
5. Maryland
6. Texas
7. Ohio
8. New Jersey
9. North Carolina
10. Florida
Data includes the following SICs:
48-836 Biological products
129-071.0102 Medical testing laboratories
129-731.01 Biological research
129-733.01 Non-commercial biological research
Source: Since 1990, BizMiner has built its reputation on quality research in the fields of economic and business development. The company tracks more than 12 million U.S. businesses annually, developing vitality benchmarks and reports on more than 17,000 lines of business in every U.S. county, MSA and state. Measures include sales, business retention, entrepreneurial activity, new branch attraction, business relocation trends and concentrations of high-growth firms.
Visit www.bizminer.com for access to more than 2.5 million local and national marketing research and financial analysis reports.
Las Vegas Is Biotech Hot Spot
In Las Vegas, where officials didn't know how to spell biotech a few years ago says one economic development official, the Nevada Cancer Institute's success is opening doors. The institute, along with two other home grown biosciences organizations, has given the region's economic developers credibility when they visit with companies about the industry in Las Vegas.
The Nevada Cancer Institute is a $200 million, 142,000-square-foot facility, which opened in 2005. The institute has broken ground on another 150,000-square-foot facility. “It is quickly becoming one of the finest cancer research and treatment centers in the United States,” says Somer Hollingsworth, president and CEO, Nevada Development Authority. “When we say that we have to qualify it and answer, ‘how did you get there so quickly?'” The institute's officials hired 30 of the top cancer research and treatment specialists in the world, which proved two things. Las Vegas could hire smart people to move to the community, because this workforce didn't exist in the town; and once there, these people love the community, Hollingsworth notes.
Another institute is the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute, a 55,000-square-foot facility that will complete construction this year. The center has hired one of the leading Alzheimer's researchers in the world, Hollingsworth notes, who is bringing researchers along with him. The center will also conduct research in Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.
The Nevada Neurosciences Institute is a full-service center that is part of the HCA Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, HCA MountainView Hospital and HCA Southern Hills Hospital & Medical Center. The institute will open a permanent office near HCA Mountain View Hospital and continue to develop its innovative community outreach and patient transfer program.
Bioscience firms are blossoming in the community. For example, NeoStem came to the area in 2007. The company will enhance the delivery of adult stem cell therapeutics. “This is the noncontroversial harvesting, and what they have done is created a nationwide network of adult stem cell collections center,” Hollingsworth says. “People donate and store their own stem cells.”
Las Vegas is also the world training center for Varian Medical Systems, Inc., which is based out of Palo Alto, Calif. “They have nearly 400,000 square feet,” Hollingsworth says. The firm makes a one of a kind cancer treatment machine that attacks tumors so precisely in the measuring process that it doesn't destroy any of the clean tissue around the tumor.
Hollingsworth says that biosciences firms will find that his organization ensures that when a company comes to town, they will meet with all the top people, the professors from the cancer institute, from Lou Ruvo and from the University of Las Vegas, which is making the switch to a research university and which is open to partnering with businesses. “We want to make sure they aren't lost in the shuffle,” he says. “We are a big town (2 million people in the metro), and we want to make sure they meet the right people and look at the right properties.”
For complete details about the biosciences sector in Las Vegas, visit www.nevadadevelopment.org.
Biosciences Booms In The Netherlands
By the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency
In the Netherlands, bioscience or what is referred to in the industry, as “red” biotechnology-- biotechnology applications for healthcare and/or biopharmaceutical purposes—has seen a 30 percent increase in start-ups, outperforming the average growth rate of 15 percent.
U.S. biotech companies who are looking to expand in Europe require access to business resources that include proximity to world-class R&D facilities, a pro-business government environment and a qualified labor pool. For these reasons, companies like Amgen, Biogen, Genzyme, Genencor and Biovec have located their European operations in the Netherlands.
Chicago-based Biovec, focused on developing new gene therapy products, has established a joint venture with the University of Groningen for clinical research aimed at a viral vector delivery vehicle to be used in coronary bypass surgery. According to David Wolf, Biovec's Chief Operating Officer, Biovec chose the Netherlands, and more specifically Groningen, for the availability of English-speaking researchers and Groningen University Hospital's expertise in cardiovascular therapy and bypass surgery.
Bioscience in the Netherlands is covered with a tight network of several different science parks: Amsterdam Science Park, Bio Med City in Groningen, Delft Technology Park, Health Valley in Nijmegen, Leiden Bioscience Park, and accelerators/incubators in Maastricht, Utrecht, Wageningen and Eindhoven. Leiden Bioscience Park is the leading life science cluster in the Netherlands, ranking among the top five most successful science parks in Europe. Leiden-based companies include Centocor, a biotechnology company founded in Philadelphia in 1979 that employs 1,100; Houston-based Stem Cell Innovations that opened its R&D operations there in May 2006; and Crucell, one of the worlds' leading independent vaccine companies.
The Dutch government has actively supported programs for rapid commercialization of scientific advances for more than two decades. Moreover, the Netherlands is home to world-class research institutions, universities and clinical research organizations (CROs). Dutch CROs include the Center for Human Drug Research (CHDR), which cooperates with academia and industry on early drug development and research; PRA International, a global clinical research organization; and INC Research, a therapeutically focused contract research organization.
The Netherlands' robust, well-developed life sciences industry is home to growing numbers of foreign companies. Because of the country's superior infrastructure, it will continue to attract more dynamic and innovative leaders of industry and continue its impressive growth in the bioscience sector.
For more information, visit the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency at www.nfia.com.
