Brain Gain

New ‘biopark’ at Fitzsimons brings brain power and construction activity

By Chryss Cada

Twenty-five research companies are currently located in the Fitzsimons biopark’s incubator building, but a single-story, 60,000-sq-ft building is under construction to handle the immediate demand for more lab space.

The greatest resource the Colorado Science + Technology Park at Fitzsimons has to offer early-stage bioscience companies isn’t high-tech facilities, skilled services or outstanding support although it has plenty of those.

What Fitzsimons has is good old-fashioned brain power, one of the largest concentrations of it in the West.

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The 170-acre site is the first university-affiliated “biopark” to be developed west of the Mississippi, according to the Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority. The FRA is a special-purpose governmental entity created in 1996 under an agreement between the city of Aurora and the University of Colorado Regents to bring more private development to the booming Fitzsimons medical campus.

The biopark provides flexible laboratory space for start-ups, early stage and established companies specializing in research-oriented biotechnology, drug development and new medical devices. It is located just north of the new Children’s Hospital, a future VA hospital and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and its sprawling hospital complex.

“The university and the hospitals are the reason the park is here,” says Jim Chrisman, a senior vice president with Forest City Enterprises Inc. in Denver, which was selected to develop the park in 2006. “These institutions are spending $1 billion in health education and research and have 3,000 to 4,000 researchers onsite. All of these resources are dedicated to developing products, and we want to provide them the facilities to develop those products.”

UCDHSC reported more than $373 million in research expenditures in 2006, with the School of Medicine ranking 15th in National Institutes of Health funding among all academic medical schools and fifth in grant dollars per faculty member, according to the Fitzsimons BioBusiness Partnership, an organization developed for bioscience businesses.

Idea Incubator The vision behind the $4.3-billion “square mile of life sciences” at Fitzsimons is to create an “interactive, scientific entrepreneurial community” where collaborations are facilitated by formal programs and informal daily encounters, adds Chrisman. “The work of university research groups and institutes ranges from human anatomy simulations and biomaterials to new cardiovascular approaches to heart failure utilizing gene therapies.”

Image courtesy of Forest City Enterprises Inc.

Private biotechnology companies are focused on a multitude of advances, among them: magnetically targeted chemotherapies to allow greater concentration at tumor sites, advanced methods for more accurate readings of mammograms and new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

Currently, 25 companies, headquartered out of state or out of the country, are located in the biopark’s incubator building-the only one operating in the park so far. A single-story, 60,000-sq-ft building is under construction to handle the overflow from the incubator building, with three companies in modular spaces awaiting completion of the building.

“We see this as an intermediate step for companies after the incubator,” Chrisman says.

Eventually, biomedical companies will land in one of two types of buildings planned for the park: two-story structures with surface parking, and four- or five-story mid-rises with structured parking.

The park will be developed to reflect an urban setting. Buildings will be built up against the streetscape, with sidewalks and tree grates in front, rather than parking lots. The end product will equal about 1.5 million sq ft of lab space.

“We’ll be building in phases,” Chrisman says. “We’ll always be working on the next module.”

A Corridor of Collaboration Forest City, which has constructed similar bioparks on the campuses of Massachusetts Institutes of Technology and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, will keep lab space flexible to accommodate a variety of users, says Chrisman. The buildings will be primarily lab space, with some minimal office support areas.

The park will include a quad that serves as a public gathering place. “What we’ve seen at our other parks is that a corridor of collaboration forms wherever professionals have a chance to gather,” Chrisman says.

The majority of the tenants of the incubator are spin-offs from the university-which has been the idea all along, says Dick Hinson, vice president of the Aurora Economic Development Council, a partnership between area businesses and government established in 1976.

“You have bright doctors and researchers who, as they are working and teaching, are always thinking too,” says Hinson. “They come up with an idea and then they think, ‘Now what do I do with it?’ They can walk across Montview [street] to the park and there are resources there to develop that idea.”

An affiliation agreement between the research park and the university will give biopark companies access to core labs and services. The Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority hopes this will draw many more bioscience companies to the site.

“In bioscience, the valley of death is the ‘proof-of-concept’ phase, when researchers must prove that they have a viable concept,” Hinson says. “The FBBP offers proof-of-concept funding so that a doctor or researcher can get their idea through to the next level.”

Once the scientists have the money to take an idea to the next level, Forest City plans to have a lab ready.

“What is most important is that you always have spec lab space available,” Chrisman says. “It’s the nature of the industry that they get a slug of funding and they need space right away to get the product to market. They can’t afford to extend that phase of the process to have a lab built.”

“[Fitzsimons] is attractive to companies considering moving here to have a brain trust right across the street,” says Jill Farnam, executive director of the Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority. “We are the only academic medical campus in the Rockies.”

Research Complex Two

UCDHSC’s expansive campus includes the 600,640-sq-ft, $216-million research facility. Completed in June 2004 by Hensel Phelps Construction Co., Research Complex 1 is focused around a cancer research tower and biomedical research tower. The facilities include wet and dry research laboratories, core laboratories, lab-support space, research and program offices, conference rooms, a central vivarium, auditorium and building support space.

Mortenson Construction of Denver will complete construction this summer on the 506,000-sq-ft, $205.8-million Research Complex 2. RC-2 is 11 stories above ground, two stories below ground, 550,000-sq-ft biomedical research facility. The two underground levels of the facility will house a vivarium and related support spaces. The ground floor houses general meeting and conference space, and the second floor consists almost entirely of mechanical/electrical space that houses all air handlers for the entire facility.

The third through eleventh floors consist of roughly one-half wet/dry laboratory and one-half office space with general service space separating the two. The 11th floor houses approximately 15,000 sq ft of Biosafety Level 3, the level designed to handle respiratory transmission of agents that can cause serious infections, in addition to the typical laboratory and office space.

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