Pennsylvania uses ‘greenhouses’
to grow nanotech jobs, startups

Aug. 20, 2002 — In an effort to forge market ties between bioscience and small tech in Pennsylvania, three Life Sciences Greenhouses may absorb the state’s Nanotechnology Institute.

That means companies that participate in the greenhouse would get first crack at new technology that emerges from the nanotech center.

The independent nanotech institute is linked with the greenhouses and may be “rolled in” to that system, said John Mallamo, vice president worldwide for West Chester, Pa.-based Cephalon Inc., a biopharmaceutical company.

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“The greenhouse combines business assistance with venture funding and other services like intellectual property protection and some marketing and related skills to startups, said Mel Billingsley, president and chief executive of the Hershey, Pa., greenhouse. “It’s an incubator and then some. Like a greenhouse, it provides life, water and shelter to companies.”

Mallamo, a board member of the Pennsylvania Nanotechnology Institute (NI), said Cephalon’s participation in the Philadelphia-centered greenhouse benefits the company because “we get the first look at any new technology that emerges from sponsored or academically generated research for the pharmaceutical industry,” he said.

Mallamo said part of his job as an NI board member is to rate the grant and research proposals for their practical applications as drugs or diagnostic techniques. These applications are at the core of the Pennsylvania project.

In June, the Pennsylvania state legislature earmarked $100 million from the state’s $11.3 billion settlement of a lawsuit against U.S. tobacco companies to seed three bioscience greenhouses centered around Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Hershey.

“About 15-20 percent of the players in the three life sciences greenhouses are involved in some kind of nano- or microtechnology,” said Matt Tunnell, executive deputy secretary for Pennsylvania’s Department of Community Economic Development.

Michele Migliuolo, president of the Pittsburgh-based Verimetra Inc., said his firm, which makes MEMS enabled medical devices, is considering joining the greenhouse project.

Migliuolo said that while many states and nations have embarked on efforts to integrate science and business applications, he expects great things with Dennis Yablonsky heading Pennsylvania’s greenhouse initiative.

“Dennis is a visionary and has proven his ability to grow the local economy in the past with his successful Digital Greenhouse,” Migliuolo said.

Yablonsky, chief executive of the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, said there is a sense of “urgency” in his cause. After 24 years in the private sector heading up two software companies, Yablonsky was chosen to head the nonprofit Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse in 1999 and after two years, he could boast of bringing more than 600 computer chip jobs to the region.

Yablonsky’s goals for the greenhouse are to raise $600 million in funding for research and commercialization, launch or lure 130 new bioscience companies and create 5,500 jobs within 10 years.

The program is expected to involve more than $150 million in private investment over the next five years. That’s on top of the 350 life sciences firms and more than $775 million in federally funded research conducted in the field at the state’s colleges and universities already in existence, according to state officials.

Each greenhouse has its own focus, although some overlap. Philadelphia’s effort is directed toward biopharmaceuticals and bioinformatics. Hershey’s main targets are drug discovery and nanobiology. Pittsburgh’s focus is regenerative medicine, neurological medicine and devices.

Together, they share marketing, training and education programs, outreach programs to rural areas, minority businesses and manufacturers, and create a statewide clinical trials network.

By identifying commercially viable work that hasn’t reach the point where it would interest investment angels or venture capitalists, and providing them with funding, the greenhouses will keep business and jobs in Pennsylvania and lose less to Massachusetts, California and other hotbeds of high tech, said Scott Melville, Cephalon’s senior director of government affairs,.

Billingsley, of the Hershey greenhouse, described the project as the largest technology-related investment in its history.

The whole range of nanotech efforts are already under way there, he explained, including surface chemistry, hard and soft materials, micromotors, microdevices and one of the nation’s leading nano fabs.

“We take care of technology with commercial potential and get those companies up and going in a way that’s viable as startups,” he said. The greenhouse assists companies in defining a market niche, the first of which — for nanotech — is as tools for analysis in this industry and others, he added.

The greenhouses operate as independent, nonprofit corporations with linkages that allow for any of them to tap into the brains and facilities of the state’s many top-rated universities. Already, he said, one company, NanoHorizons Inc., has been spun off from research at Pennsylvania State and aims to commercialize a surface for use in protein and DNA analysis.

“Many of the new technologies in nanotech will be used for new drug discovery. Our job is to — when appropriate — build it out and make sure there’s an economic stickiness in our areas. We do not want to buff up technology companies to high levels and then hand them over to some other wonderful state in the union. We want to keep our areas moving and thriving. They come to us not because they like us in Pennsylvania, but because we have clear strengths in these areas,” Billingsley said

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