This content is sponsored by the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation.
With more than 300 life sciences companies providing jobs to 26,000 employees, Montgomery County, Maryland, anchors the third largest biopharmaceuticals cluster in the country and is a Mid-Atlantic hotspot for discovery and innovation.
WTOP spoke with four industry experts about what makes Montgomery County a prime location for biopharma businesses and entrepreneurs and also what the future holds for the DMV’s thriving life sciences industry.
Helping this foundational local industry continue to succeed is a critical initiative for the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation. “Our mission is to attract businesses to Montgomery County but also to work with businesses to retain them here within the county,” said Prayas Neupane, director of economic development for MCEDC. “We also support companies that are located here to grow and expand within our region.”
Meeting specialized biopharma real estate needs
To do that, MCEDC has brought together a team of real estate and facility partners that can support the development and space needs of the county’s biopharma community, Neupane said. That’s especially important because life sciences companies have unique space needs, said Pat Larrabee, president and CEO of Facility Logix, which she founded 20 years ago.
As an MCEDC partner, Facility Logix helps with the unique build-out requirements of these companies, from the needs of an emergent stage business that’s securing its initial funding through the large-scale company conducting clinical trials. They all need lab space — for both wet labs and dry labs, she said.
“We have individuals on our team with deep science and compliance backgrounds coupled with design and construction expertise,” Larrabee said, “and we work very closely with Montgomery County.”
Another partner is Minkoff Development. It provides an integrated mix of commercial real estate development services, said Jeffrey Chod, a partner at Minkoff.
“With that comes construction development, property management, leasing, et cetera — delivering cohesive services for what a tenant or customer may need,” Chod said, adding, “We have a portfolio of properties … and because of the vertical integration, we have a different toolbox of solutions that we can customize … to make sure we can create win-win solutions for the customer.”
And for a big-picture and financial perspective, there’s JLL, a publicly traded fortune 500 real estate advisory company. Pete Briskman, JLL’s executive managing director, said he wears two hats.
“My role is as a site selection specialist, but I’m also co-lead of our Mid-Atlantic Life Sciences Practice,” he said. “I work with early-stage companies, mid-stage, and as they get more established, I help advise them on the real estate side.”
Briskman described his work as “inside the tent with these tenants,” which has provided valuable knowledge and insights that he can offer life sciences companies in devising real estate strategies.
Getting creative to meet life sciences facility needs
“Montgomery County is poised well in comparison to other regions” to offer biopharma and biotech companies a stable foundation for growth, Briskman said.
He pointed to both the county’s proximity to government organizations, like the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration, as well as the talent pipeline provided by the numerous universities across the region.
He sees 2024 and beyond as promising for the local life sciences industry. “In biotech and life sciences … you have this great promising science, but it’s very expensive in order to bring it along through each clinical stage. But we see it actually being steady and growing because health care isn’t going away.”
Even so, it can be challenging to build out space in the current economic climate, the panelists said.
Chod pointed out that many companies want to be in a facility as soon as they receive regulatory approval on a product or have a successful trial. But “space takes time to build out,” he said. “Buildings take even longer.”
It requires teaming to come up with creative ways to accommodate incremental growth, Chod said, as well as taking advantage of existing resources.
“For one tenant in our portfolio that needed a specialized production area, a couple of thousand square feet was going to cost $3 million to build — just a huge expense, and they weren’t ready to go raise that money,” he said.
The solution? Chod found a partner company that had similar space and some excess capacity that they were willing to license out. “We were able to create a one- or two-year, short-term bridge for that company to leverage that manufacturing facility until the capital markets improve,” he said.
Tapping region’s skilled tech talent to evolve biopharma
Another benefit of launching and growing life sciences businesses in Montgomery County is access to a large highly skilled labor market compared to other regions of the country, Briskman said.
It’s a critical asset in helping with innovation and new technology development, Larrabee added. Both she and Briskman noted that many companies are starting to integrate artificial intelligence, for instance, especially in R&D initiatives aimed at identifying potential targets for therapies and in predictive analytics.
Larrabee said local life sciences companies are very strong in cell and immunotherapy research, and have successfully advanced therapies through clinical trials and commercialized them. Another focus area now is the quest for personalized medicine, which has led biopharma businesses to reimagine their lab spaces, creating small specialized units versus large-scale labs focused on single large-scale products.
New technology adoption and R&D approaches aren’t going to stop, so companies need to take an agile approach to their facilities so that they can adapt easily when needed, she advised.
Neupane said all of this illustrates why Montgomery County is an ideal biopharma ecosystem. “We have the right kind of partners, who not only think about life sciences in the scientific manner but understand that speed to market is really important for companies. That is one of the key reasons why we’ve been really successful as a county.”
