Biotech pioneer closes in Yonkers
Aureon Biosciences Inc., a pioneering company in Westchester County”™s growing biotech industry, has suddenly closed operations in downtown Yonkers.
Aureon officers on Wednesday notified the state Department of Labor that its office and laboratory facility at 28 Wells Avenue closed the previous day. The closing affects 95 employees.
A leading company and acclaimed model for success in the effort to develop a biotech industry cluster in Westchester and the seven-county Hudson Valley region, Aureon was the victim of financial decisions by its three major investors, according to a source who has worked closely with the company.
“The decision was made for reasons unclear to pull the funding from the company and put the company”™s intellectual property up for sale,” said Michael Oates, president and CEO of the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corp. (HVEDC) in New Windsor. “It absolutely comes as a shock to us and frankly to a great deal of the (Aureon) employees as well.”
The nonprofit agency headed by Oates assists businesses in relocating or expanding in the region and spearheads NY BioHud Valley, a one-year-old marketing initiative by private-sector and government partners to build a cluster of biotech and pharmaceutical companies in the talent-rich region. Aureon is a member of the BioHud Valley advisory council. Charles J. DiComo, Aureon”™s top research scientist and corporate compliance officer, serves on the HVEDC board of directors.
DiComo and Aureon president and CEO Robert J. Shovlin could not be reached to comment on the closing.
“It was broken to the company likely the day they made the decision,” Oates said of Aureon’s investors. “It was clearly very sudden. They were stunned. There was no period of time to transition.”
Founded in 2001, Aureon has developed and marketed two predictive tests for prostate cancer that assess individual risk in newly diagnosed and postsurgical patients.
Aureon in 2002 opened its corporate headquarters and commercial clinical labs in a 14,000-square-foot space in a former Otis Elevator Co. factory building in the i.park Hudson complex near the Yonkers waterfront. In June, the company announced its expansion and consolidation of operations at i.park Hudson in 28,000 square feet of space. The company in the last two years had grown from 30 employees to more than 100
employees.
Those employees will find hiring opportunities with other companies in the Hudson Valley, where biotech has seen “explosive growth,” said Oates. “I think the science they”™ve developed at Aureon will be very valuable to other companies, as will their employees,” he said.
Laurence P. Gottlieb, Westchester County economic development director, said Aureon”™s demise is reflective of “a really tough economy.” The biotech industry is “a high-risk, high-reward business” where multimillion-dollar investments in research and development can come to naught, he said.
In Yonkers, where Contrafect Corp., a company developing drug treatments for highly resistant infectious diseases, this year joined Aureon as a biotech tenant at i.park Hudson, “There will be other firms that take Aureon”™s place,” said Gottlieb. “Good lab space is hard to come by in the region.”