The Coming of the Wet Lab

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The story below is 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.”

Roanoke, Lamouille says, is attractive for all the obvious reasons and “the cost is lower here.” The first iteration of tech company space “was RAMP,” but it is a dry space. Facilities and equipment are necessary to move forward.

Some of the principals of these new technology and biotech businesses are meeting occasionally for Beer and Biotech, says Gourdie. The interplay “is not unlike the traditional departments of a university, but this is an unusual level of direction among the institutes.”

Lamouille says, “This [FBRI] building is very interdisciplinary and there is a lot of cooperation even among the different disciplines.”

“The main driver,” says Gourdie, “is the growth of medical campuses. Once the model is in place, it attracts people from the outside.”

Gourdie says, “We are both academics, not entrepreneurs. … We have to learn to engage the commercialization machinery. Once we move outside the basic sphere, there will be much larger amounts of money.”

Sarah Snider, the PhD CEO of BEAM Diagnostics, which is housed in RAMP, does not need a wet lab for her behavioral health company, but she sees the value. “We [Dr. Warren Bickel and Dr. James MacKillop, her partners] spun off from FBRI and became a strategic partner with Carilion,” she says. “The tech corridor will streamline the process of what comes to Roanoke.  

“I couldn’t be more grateful. We were part of the second cohort to grow with RAMP and the eco-system and I feel like we’ve been here from the beginning.”

Grinning, Feldmann throws this out: “Friedlander says a Nobel Prize winner is coming.” With the wet lab and innovation corridor, it could be sooner rather than later. 

Agee: ‘Where Magic Happens’

The proposed wet lab is expected to become a gathering place for some very big brains, working on some very big projects in the Roanoke Valley.

Carilion President and CEO Nancy Agee has been one of the primary players in creating a bio-medical base in the Roanoke Valley and the proposed wet lab and Innovation Corridor is the next significant step in the process.

Agee responded to the following questions from The Roanoker:

Q: What’s the value for Roanoke and the region of having this wet lab in a 30,000-square-foot building in the center of town?

A: We’ve been collaborating for a decade to turn our region’s shared vision of becoming a life sciences hub into reality. Most recently, we’ve worked with the City of Roanoke, the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, Virginia Western and Verge to develop wet lab space to meet the needs of research spinoffs and other biotechnology start-ups.

Other regions that have fostered life sciences, biomedical research and healthcare innovation growth feature wet and dry lab space for entrepreneurs and innovators to collaborate and test new ideas. The lab space is at the center of Roanoke’s Innovation Corridor, and that’s by design. We’ve known for a long time that when intelligent people can collaborate in an inviting space with the right resources, amazing things happen. We like to talk about buildings, which are essential platforms for innovation. But we always need to remember that the people who will use those buildings matter most. Their interactions are where the magic happens.

Q: What new businesses do you project moving in, and how will that benefit Carilion?

A: Wet and dry lab space will attract business (both existing and start-ups) in the life sciences, biotechnology and healthcare sectors. And, as I mentioned before, the lab space is only one small piece of this puzzle. Most importantly, the space will be a gathering place. The greatest minds in the region from Carilion, Virginia Tech, Radford University and many other organizations will be able to gather and connect with those who have promising new ideas.

Q: Roanoke’s technology/healthcare image has grown exponentially in the past few years with FBRI and VTC’s various enterprises. How will this improve that image and its delivery?

A: People come to our region for its outstanding outdoor amenities and the opportunity to work on exciting and challenging projects. They also come to our region to connect with leading researchers at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and Virginia Tech in general. They come to learn about exciting clinical developments happening at Carilion. This refurbished building will be an innovative gathering place that fosters partnerships like those already leading our region’s transformation.

The story above is from our January/February 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!