On the New York Medical College campus in Valhalla, work has begun to convert a vacant lab building that once housed a pioneering researcher linking tobacco smoking with cancer and other diseases into a regional biotechnology center for disaster medicine and emerging infections.
The center might grow to include incubator space for private biotech startups given valuable access to the college”™s facilities and resources and network of hospital clinicians in the metropolitan area.
Due to be completed by December 2012, the $12.55-million first-phase project is funded by the private New York Medical College, which owns the approximately 120,000-square-foot building on Dana Road, and the public New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation. Medical college officials, backed by U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer, are seeking state and federal funding for the project”™s second phase, the estimated $11.5-million redevelopment of incubator lab and research space for private companies.
Offering below-market rents to new and emerging businesses, the incubator “will develop future tenants for Landmark and space around BioHud Valley,” said Dr. Robert W. Amler, the college”™s vice president for government affairs and dean of its School of Health Sciences and Practice. He was referring to the Landmark at Eastview, BioMed Realty Trust”™s expanded biotech lab and office complex on the former Union Carbide campus in Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant, and the private-public BioHud Valley marketing initiative, led by the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corp. in New Windsor, to promote and develop the seven-county region as the biotech industry”™s East Coast epicenter.
HVEDC officials said the region has 86 biotech companies that employ nearly 11,000 residents. Westchester County and the Landmark at Eastview are home to the state”™s largest biotech company, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., which plans to hire an additional 600 employees in 2011 after adding 300 employees in 2010. Nearly 20 percent of the biotechnology workforce in New York, 8,000 employees, works at companies in Westchester, where economic development officials estimate biotech businesses created more than 1,000 jobs last year.
Amler said about 20,000 square feet of space will be renovated in the project”™s first phase for a clinical skills laboratory and disaster simulation center to train New York Medical College students. The state last year awarded the college a $3.25-million grant through its Generating Employment through New York State Science program to create the Hudson Valley Biotechnology Center for Disaster Medicine and Emerging Infections.
Amler said students will practice medical procedures on highly specialized mannequins and technology designed for disaster response training. The simulation center also will provide temporary “gigs” to professional actors simulating victims of terrorist attacks and disasters, the dean said.
The state grant also provides for a multidisciplinary research center to study and prepare for newly emerging or recurring infectious diseases.
Schumer, the state”™s senior Democratic senator from Brooklyn, wants the federal government to make the Valhalla biotech incubator a federally funded center for advanced biomedical research programs to develop medical countermeasures to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies.
Touring the project site last month, Schumer called on the federal Department of Health and Human Services to include the proposed incubator in programs funded by its year-old Office of Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
The federal office will award up to $100 million over three years to private biotech companies to develop vaccines, drugs, therapies and diagnostic tools to counter natural and man-made biological threats to public health. The program provides companies with testing, evaluation and product development and manufacturing services, reducing opportunity costs and barriers to innovation for the private sector.
BARDA also manages Project BioShield, a 7-year-old program to procure and develop medical countermeasures for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear agents and for pandemic influenza and other emerging infectious diseases. Schumer suggested that program too could invest in Valhalla incubator enterprises.
The biotech incubator “will be a huge step toward making the Hudson Valley a national center of medical innovation and biotechnology,” Schumer said during his visit to the site. “When a new threat appears on the horizon, I want the vaccine, the antidote or the cures being produced right here in the Hudson Valley.”
Amler said incubator space could be developed in stages to suit investors or as a single project. Biotech tenants will determine the focus of research and development, which will not be limited to disaster medicine and public-health countermeasures.
Amler noted the college”™s Institute of Public Health sponsors an academic center for disaster medicine. Faculty already is working on medical countermeasures “in a number of different areas of disaster response,” he said. Faculty members with patents are expected to start companies in the incubator for commercial product development.
“Most of these folks are going to want just a tiny amount of space so they can start developing an idea,” said the dean. The center will provide affordable, high-quality research support and appropriate technology. “Compared to doing this in your garage or your parents”™ basement, this has the space” needed by startups, he said.
“We expect a number of these will fail,” Amler said of incubator tenants. “That”™s the nature of research.”
The total project is projected to create 140 full-time laboratory, animal facility, public health and support staff jobs and 75 part-time jobs for professional actors, animal handlers and epidemiology and simulation center workers. The building rehabilitation will create 50 or more construction jobs over two to three years.
Amler said the building formerly was home to the American Health Foundation, a private organization founded in 1969 by Ernst Wynder, a physician and public health researcher and epidemiologist who collected and published some of the earliest data linking tobacco use to lung cancer.
As a physician at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Amler said he worked by phone with Wynder, who died in 1999, and used much of his groundbreaking data. “He was one of the giants on whose shoulders I got to stand,” he said.
Wynder”™s Valhalla research facility in the ”˜90s was converted to the Institute for Cancer Prevention. The institute declared bankruptcy in 2004, shortly after federal investigators claimed institute officials fraudulently used $5 million in federal grants for expenses that were not reimbursable. The institute”™s former president and officers in 2007 agreed to pay $2.3 million to settle the case.
New York Medical College paid $2.6 million to acquire the Dana Road building in 2006. The purchase cost is part of the college”™s $9.3-million investment in the biotech project”™s first phase.
