|
Mighty mouse
Upstate rodent breeder eyes Yonkers
By JOHN GOLDEN
Westchester County Business Journal, February 4, 2008
Mice, lots of them, are coming to Westchester County under tight
controls next year. Occupying 50,000 square feet of indoor space in up
to 40,000 cages, the rodent colony could herald the emergence of a new
biotech center in Yonkers.
There, a metropolitan academic research consortium will team with a
Hudson Valley company that is one of the world’s leading breeders of
lab-quality rodents to open a “mouse house” for biomedical research. Its
developers expect it will draw more biotech companies and research
institutions to Yonkers’ revitalized industrial spaces.
At I-park N-Valley, a 116,000-square-foot technology center in a former
pharmaceutical factory at 470 Nepperhan Ave., Academic Medicine
Development Company (AMDeC) will open a $10 million shared-use mouse
facility by winter or spring 2009. AmDeC officers last week announced
their choice of Taconic Farms, an international breeder of rats and mice
for in vivo research, with corporate offices in Hudson and the world’s
largest mouse- and rat-breeding facility in Germantown, both in Columbia
County, to manage the shared facility.
Among top researchers and institutions, “There’s a very big comfort
level” with Taconic Farms and its expertise, Dr. Maria K. Mitchell,
president of AMDeC, said last week from her company’s Manhattan office.
Founded in 1952, the family-owned Taconic Farms operates 10 breeding
facilities and service laboratories in the U.S., Denmark and Germany. In
November, the company bought an 80 percent stake in Artemis
Pharmaceuticals GmbH, a leader in mouse and rat genetics and genomics
technology based in Cologne, Germany. The privately held Taconic Farms
has 960 employees and annual revenues conservatively estimated in excess
of $100 million, said company President Todd Little. Little said the
Hudson Valley company is the world’s third leading commercial provider
of rat and mouse models for the study of human diseases.
The shared operation in Yonkers is said to be the first of its kind in
the country. “In the past, there wasn’t an enormous amount of
collaboration among institutions” doing such research, Mitchell said.
“New York doesn’t have a long history of collaboration.” The Yonkers
center, launched with a $7 million state appropriation, sends a message
to research scientists and companies that that has changed, she said.
Mitchell said AMDeC hopes to secure a $1.5 million federal economic
development grant and an additional $1.5 million from the state to
complete financing for the project. Located in a state Empire Zone and
federal Empowerment Zone, the site’s tenant will be eligible for various
tax credits and employment incentives.
Founded 11 years ago, AMDeC is a nonprofit consortium of 28 of the
state’s medical schools, academic health centers and major medical
research institutions. Its mission is both to educate the public about
biomedical research and to raise funds, advocate for and help develop
more collaborative research projects and state-of-the-art research
facilities to establish “a world-leading biotechnology industry” in New
York State. The consortium, Mitchell said, is “a neutral party in
bringing together something like this” in Yonkers.
Yonkers-bred mice will be used by researchers at Rockefeller University,
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York University School of Medicine
and North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System. “We suspect that there
will be more than four partners down the road,” with industrial partners
in biotech companies possibly using the facility too, said Mitchell.
“The primary driver for the creation of the facility was the space
issue,” Mitchell said. Housing breeding sites for animal research is
especially expensive in New York City, she said.
Little said Taconic Farms will especially house and breed mutant or
genomically altered mouse models for AMDeC. “The tremendous popularity
of them in science has created a tremendous demand for space that allows
for production of these animals,” he said. Taconic Farms will assist in
designing the facility to give research investigators “high-quality,
moderate-cost space for providing these animals.” The off-site center
will free up space in research labs at participating institutions while
allowing for easy product transport in the metropolitan area, he said.
“It’s a big institutional cost-saving on the one hand,” Mitchell said,
“and on the other hand it provides a space that’s hard to come by in New
York State.” She said the facility should help recruit and retain
research investigators, especially those with large stocks of mice,
while also attracting start-up biotech companies “where before they
would have gone to New Jersey or somewhere else,” she said.
At full build-out in the fifth year of operation, Taconic Farms will
employ 40 workers at the Yonkers site, Little said.
“It’s an exciting thing for Yonkers,” said Joseph Cotter, managing
member of I-park N-Valley L.L.C., owner of the site. “We’ve been working
on it for over three years.”
The Greenwich, Conn., company is an independent offshoot of National
RE/sources L.L.C., the Greenwich real estate development and investment
company that has used its I-park model to redevelop idle commercial
complexes for mixed use in New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine and at Lake
Success on Long Island. In Yonkers, the company also operates I-park
Hudson at the former Otis Elevator plant on Wells Street. Cotter said
the partners paid the city about $15 million to acquire the N-Valley
site, which has expanded to include about 160,000 square feet of space.
Cotter said some of the four institutions joining in the shared-use
project might also lease separate space at I-park N-Valley. Taconic
Farms also is looking at renting space there. “We think it creates an
R&D and biotech cluster that could lead to a lot more tenants as the
cost of space in New York gets more expensive,” Cotter said.
|
