Frederick Takes Another Stride to be Stem Cell Research Capital of America

There’s a nice write up in today’s Frederick News-Post about the new “Open” Innovation Space Life Technologies opened at 7305 Executive Way.  The Innovation space will put the primary, stem cells and custom cell culture groups in one, open space along with the Marketing, R&D and Operations people from these groups.

According to the article:

The company looked at several sites before settling on Frederick for its stem cell headquarters, said Nicolas M. Barthelemy, Life Technologies leader of the Cells System division, who flew in from California for the open house Thursday.

Frederick’s labor availability, good schools and proximity to airports, combined with the fact that the National Institute of Health is the company’s largest customer, made Frederick an ideal location, Barthelemy said.

Life Tech appears more focused on Stem Cell Research as opposed to therapeutic uses of Stem Cells.  Lonza-Walkersville has a large catalog of research use stem cells.  I don’t think people in town appreciate how these two companies dominate the research side of stem cell products.  At Life Tech the media for growing the cells is still made by GIBCO division in Buffalo, where traditionally their cell culture expertise resided.

Speaking of Stem Cells in Maryland, The Frederick News-Post is looking for anyone who attended the Md Stem Cell Symposium at Johns Hopkins last week, on Dec. 3rd.  Anyone know anyone who went?

Here is my rant about why I didn’t go this year:

I did not attend the first Stem Cell Symposium at Hopkins.  I would have liked to see more money from the Md. Stem Cell Commission going to Industry, rather than an institution who is already the single largest recipient of NIH research funds ($560-580MM in ‘07, in various reports) and has the largest endowment in the State ($2.8BB/yr).  Although originally touted to spur the growth in the state’s biotech industry, only one recipient of funds in 2007 was non-academic, with ~80% of the funds going to JHU.  In 2008,  no non-academic institution was funded.  I don’t think we (Industry in general and small businesses in my case) are playing on a level playing field with giant research institutions like JHU, UMd & UMB in competing for these grants.  JHU has obviously proven that they are very good at winning NIH grants, and the Md Stem Cell Commission has chosen the “NIH Model” as the mechanism for apply for grants.  I think it is unfortunate that the long term goals of funding basic research on stem cells was met, yet small business was excluded for the mix.  By funding small business through this mechanism, the state could see immediate, short term economic benefit. We need to have a commercial, saleable product result from our research, otherwise, we’re not a viable business.  The goal of large research institutions is to publish, present at scientific conferences and win more funding.  Commercialization is nowhere on the radar screen, but often results by happenstance as a by-product of research.