A Center for Biotechnology

In the midst of the University’s steadily growing East Campus sits an abandoned industrial building that is about to undergo a transformation.

Albany Molecular Research (AMR), a rapidly expanding company which conducts drug development research for pharmaceutical companies, is renovating the building to house a pilot manufacturing operation. The facility will produce small batches of pharmaceuticals for use in clinical trials.

For both the region and the University, the $11 million renovation is clearly good news. The manufacturing operation will add an estimated 150 jobs in the next three years, and yet another part of the East Campus, which was vacant when it was acquired by the University in 1996, will come back to life. The new facility, the first manufacturing operation on any of the University’s campuses, is a milestone for other reasons as well. It is a critical step toward the realization of the University’s broader vision for the East Campus, a vision that aims to build both the University’s and the region’s strengths in biotechnology.

“Now this campus has in place all the pieces—from basic research to pilot manufacturing—to move along biotechnology or pharmaceutical products,” says Eugene Schuler, M.P.A.’73, the University’s director of technology development.

Those pieces have been falling into place since the University acquired the campus, a 58-acre parcel of the former Sterling Winthrop pharmaceutical company complex in East Greenbush. A $5 million state economic development grant financed the acquisition, and the new campus, which is located across the Hudson River from the University’s other campuses in Albany, became the home of the University’s School of Public Health.

The School of Public Health occupies about one-tenth of the 365,000 square feet of available space at the East Campus. In the remaining space, the University set out to establish a business incubator “that not only created jobs for the region, but also maintained its ties with University students and faculty in the long run,” said Schuler. The theme for the East Campus became health, with an emphasis on biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

One of the first companies to arrive was VEC Technologies, a two-person company that provides cultures of endothelial cells, which line blood vessels, to researchers. Later came Taconic Biotechnology, a subsidiary of a Columbia County firm that breeds mice and rats for research.

Albany Molecular Research, whose co-founders Thomas D’Ambra and Chester Opalka once worked for Sterling at the site and whose main facility is in Albany, found the campus laboratories perfect expansion space. AMR provides integrated chemistry research and development services to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

And earlier this year the University’s new Center for Comparative Functional Genomics, where scientists perform the kind of basic research that underlies the booming biotechnology field, started on the campus.

The field of comparative functional genomics relies on the thriftiness of nature. Similar genes have similar functions in very different organisms, and that means that researchers can use other organisms to advance understanding of human genetic processes.

Center co-director and biologist Paulette McCormick, for example, is exploring the molecular structure of metastatic tumor cells, the cells that spread cancer from an original tumor to other sites.

“Our working hypothesis is that the surfaces of metastatic tumor cells must differ in some way from the surfaces of non-metastatic tumor cells, which are the vast majority of cells within a tumor. Such differences would be necessary in order for the metastatic cells to break away from the original tumor, enter the bloodstream, and exit to establish another tumor site,” explains McCormick.

Through her research, she has identified a protein that is present only on the surface of metastatic cells, not on non-metastatic cells, both in humans and in mice. Her next step will be to test in mice ways to destroy metastatic cells. Through Taconic Biotechnology, McCormick can secure mouse models critical to her research. And if she or any other researcher identifies, say, an anti-cancer treatment considered suitable for human clinical trials, AMR would have the capability to manufacture it.

When Albany Molecular decided to expand its work into pilot manufacturing, the company considered acquiring a facility out of state. But New York State agreeed to providea $2 million grant through its Jobs Now program, an initiative developed by New York State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, and right on the campus was the facility that has served as a pilot manufacturing facility for Sterling and could be renovated for AMR's needs.

"We are very pleased by the willingness of New York State and the University at Albany to support this expansion," said D'Ambra, AMR's chairman and CEO. "Having this region known as a center for biotechnology is good for all of us."