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UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
Tenants settle in at eco-friendly BioVentures Center
Reporter: Gigi Wood
gigi@corridorbiznews.com
Finishing touches are all that remain for the University of Iowa’s BioVentures Center, which celebrated a ribbon cutting last week. The 90,000-square-foot, $20 million project serves as the university’s new business incubator, specifically geared toward taking scientific startups to the commercialization stage.
“It’s a marvelous facility. We’re really excited about it, it couldn’t have turned out any better,” said Thomas Sharpe, UI associate vice president for research.
The building consists of 20 laboratories and 16 offices with six tenants. Half of the building remains a shell, to house a corporate tenant. The center is the result of a public/private partnership between the UI and Ryan Companies, the facility’s builder and owner.
Ryan seeks a corporate tenant for the empty wing. At one time, National Genecular Institute (NGI), a California-based research company, was expected to rent more than half of the building. That deal fell through and the company no longer answers its phone lines. The search continues for a private tenant.
“We’ve had several people look at the space, several interested parties, but we’ve not had any takers as of yet,” said Marc Gullickson, vice president at Ryan. “We remain quite optimistic that we’ll be able to lease out the space shortly. It’s a wonderful space with a great location and it shows very well.”
The space available for a corporate tenant remains unfinished.
“It’s completed as a shell,” Mr. Sharpe said. “The first floor doesn’t even have concrete poured so that they can be flexible in terms of what they need to do for plumbing. There aren’t any interior walls in the building to speak of except for stairwells and that type of thing. Right now it’s open space, so it’s very flexible with what might be done with it depending upon the needs of the tenant that comes there.”
The BioVentures Center is located in the UI Research Park, north of Interstate 80 on the east side of Highway 965. Also within the park are the Technology Innovation Center (TIC), the UI’s original business incubator; the new and old Hygienic Laboratory and a multi-tenant facility for young companies, among others.
The new center is not meant to replace the TIC and no TIC companies made the move when the building opened in November.
“The ones that are in that building are, they are basically office space companies and this building is designed for companies that need laboratory space,” Mr. Sharpe said. “So they will remain in that building.”
There are no plans to raze the aging TIC, although changes could be made to Oakdale Hall, located at the Hygienic Laboratory.
“With the moving of the Hygienic Laboratory over to their new building, the people who remain in Oakdale Hall, there’s some interest on the part of the administration to essentially to remove Oakdale Hall from the park because it’s a very inefficient building,” he said. “Whatever happens they’re not going to tear down the building without having adequate space for the people who would be in that building at the time.”
Three buildings – the UI Main Library, the chemistry building and Oakdale Hall – account for nearly half of the $167 million annual maintenance cost for UI general fund buildings, according to UI Facilities Management.
The BioVentures Center, however, is anything but inefficient. It is outfitted with high-performance glass, a solar-reflecting roof membrane and built with recycled materials, according to Bradd Brown, a principal at OPN Architects, which designed the building.
Native prairie grasses grow on site and the building is located near trails for a green commute. Showers were added to the first-floor restrooms so workers can clean up after a bike ride or jog.
Various energy efficient features were added to the building, such as occupancy sensors on lighting fixtures, variable frequency drives on the air handling unit, heat and water pumps as well as sensors on plumbing fixtures. High-performance light fixtures, performance boilers and a sealed combustion water heater were used in the building. A back-up generator is fueled by natural gas instead of diesel.
Tenants include ASL Analytical, a noninvasive blood glucose monitor maker; Cellular Engineering Technologies, which provides engineering expertise in cell biology; Exemplar Genetics, which studies models of cystic fibrosis; Terpenoid Therapeutics, a drug development company; and Vertex, a small molecule drug company. KemPharm, a biotech company in North Liberty, plans to move into the center in March. The center can house about 12 to 15 companies.
“We have slated to come in as kind of the first wave, six companies,” Mr. Sharpe said. “Four of the six were on the research park, either at the multi-tenant facility or at another place. One company (KemPharm) is a newly established company in the area that we weren’t able to provide laboratory space for and now they’re moving back to us and then another one (Exemplar) is a company that is just getting established.”
The BioVentures Center offers critical wet-lab space to startup scientific research companies. Wet-lab space is essential for life-science companies. Researchers test and analyze chemicals, drugs and other materials in wet labs, which typically require specialized ventilation and other infrastructure that control various factors that could alter the results of a test, such as dust particles in the air.
“Most universities don’t have something like this setup in their incubator space,” said Chris Rogers of Exemplar Genetics. “There aren’t many universities that support it at this level.”
Exemplar was formed in June as an offshoot of Trans Ova Genetics in Sioux Center and research conducted at UI. The company creates models of human disease, with the aim of developing a new model for cystic fibrosis.
“It will, one, allow researchers to better understand the disease; once that’s known, to also develop therapeutics for the disease,” he said.
The BioVentures Center provided the right fit for Exemplar.
“The kind of work we do, particularly here in Coralville, we need a particular lab setup and really, before this was built, there weren’t any options in the area,” Mr. Rogers said. “The university was the only place with this kind of environment and you can’t run a commercial business out of a university.”
A grand opening is planned for the BioVentures Center in May. CBJ
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