The story below is a preview from our January/February 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
The new ‘wet lab’ in the center of Roanoke’s Innovation Corridor promises a great deal for Roanoke as a biotech center.
Mary Miller, the founding director of the business accelerator RAMP in Roanoke, tells this story when asked about the coming biotech explosion in the Roanoke Valley:
“Giant bamboo must be watered continually for five years before it even peeks out of the ground. The shoots must never go dry, and they must be watered every day. Then suddenly, giant bamboo emerges and grows 90 feet in the first five weeks. Everyone stands back and says, ‘Wow!’”
Apparently, the Roanoke Valley is sitting on the edge of that Wow! moment with the impending opening of the new wet lab on Jefferson Street and all that is expected to follow.
A wet lab is an “experimental lab [and the] type of laboratory where it is necessary to handle various types of chemicals and potential ‘wet’ hazards.” The wet lab, located in a vacant Carilion building, will open its 33,000-square-feet of space early in 2024, with several expected startups and possibly one major national company occupying some of its space. It could eventually house as many as 25 new and established biotech companies. The lab represents a $16 million Commonwealth investment, several sources say.
Gregory Feldmann, president of Skyline Capital Strategies, considers the wet lab the lynchpin of the planned “Innovation Corridor,” running from Roanoke Memorial Hospital to downtown Roanoke and between Williamson Road on the east and Franklin Road on the west.
It is not a large corridor, but the potential is great, says Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center director Brett Malone says, “What you see in Blacksburg is that co-working spaces create a lot of interactions [among companies]. It’s like an academic environment, but for commercial purposes. We’ve seen it in CRC for years.”
He is already seeing benefits: “Roanoke has a focused team. The whole technology corridor [along I-81] could become a much more focused sector. Roanoke is putting it on the map as relates to biosciences and it’s starting to get noticed for the focus on life sciences. Heywood Fralin [who supported the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC] says, ‘We need to make this bigger.’ The building is an anchor on Jefferson and is just a start. It’s a downtown Roanoke version of the CRC. We won’t build sprawling, we’ll go up.”
Erin Burcham of the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council says this has been a while in coming: “We get a lot of calls for coaching at an early stage and needed more capacity on multiple levels—wraparound services to help coach entrepreneurs on capital, opportunities for funding, alignment with mentors. There’s a big need for early-stage programming, so we partner with ICAP [Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program] through George Mason and the [Small Business Development Center] out of Northern Virginia to work with early early-stage mentors. All these services just needed a home base and not be so siloed. It made sense to have one studio for different entities to come together.”
Malone says, “We can put 25 companies in [the wet lab], 250 jobs, high-paying jobs, $70,000-$75,000 per employee. What makes the building unique is that it is catering to early-stage startups coming out of [the FBRI], the first step in developing the eco system. Michael Friedlander [director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, among other duties] is great at cultivating researchers, but can’t run companies from FBRI.
“A partnership with Johnson & Johnson’s JLABS described as ‘a global life science network for innovation, providing startups with access to capital-efficient lab space and resources,’ creates the commercial side. RAMP, RBTC, JLABS will then leave bigger sections of building available to bigger companies to do what they do. … The building is just one along the corridor we can continue to develop.”
Says entrepreneur Victor Iannello, CEO of Chorda Pharma in Roanoke, “There has been nurturing [of small business] for a lot of years here and it is beginning to bear fruit. There is nothing radical in this that we haven’t been talking about for years. … Powerhouses have been working together and it’s starting to happen.”
Iannello’s company, which has developed a non-opioid topical crème for pain relief, is one of the candidates for inclusion in the wet lab. Companies like his “need a place to grow,” he says.
Mary Miller says, “We have had several companies from RAMP who need wet lab space to grow in our region. Lab space has been a void. The wet lab and the programs that will be offered feel like fertilizer to the bamboo. I honestly believe that we will not only support our homegrown successes, but we will also entice others to move to our region for the facilities and support they can receive.
“The addition of the wet lab is another important building block and the fact that it will be located so near to RAMP and Fralin Biomedical Research Institute is a big plus.”
Roanoke City Manager Bob Cowell is all in on the corridor and wet lab. “Support of the activities in the Innovation Corridor are critical for the city both in job creation and overall economic activity. The economic benefit comes at both ends of the spectrum – that is, the work of the region’s largest employers, Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech, and the jobs they continue to create in our community, along with the economic activity they stimulate and at the other end.”
The economic benefits, says Cowell, “are potentially many, but two worth highlighting include the ability to rapidly and effectively move innovation from the FBRI and Carilion Clinic into commercialization, enabling new job-creating businesses to form and receive the support they need to sustain their growth. The other is to enable the scaling of health and wellness and biomedical research from the research lab to the marketplace in a manner that brings the associated health benefits to more people, both in our region and across the nation. When fully operational the shared lab will play a key role in making both our economy stronger and our residents healthier.”
Feldmann notes that “innovation is not a lone wolf enterprise any longer. Venture capitalists want revolutionary, not evolutionary. It starts with smart people working on a problem.”
Among those “smart people” are partners Samy Lamouille of Acomhal Research and Rob Gourdie of Tiny Cargo. “We were recruited here in 2014 and we saw the potential growth of the research institute,” says Lamouille. The pair’s companies study cancer cells and develop therapeutic strategies to “target communication mechanism to prevent metastases in human cancer progression.”
Want to learn more about the upcoming wet lab in Innovation Corridor? Check out the latest issue, now on newsstands, or see it for free in our digital guide linked below!
The story below is a preview from our January/February 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!