Focus on Frederick, Maryland - City Attracts Over $750 Million in Biotech Spending

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). The city of Frederick, Maryland, the state's second largest city, was founded over 250 years ago. Despite its historic roots, today the city finds itself on the cutting edge of biotech research. With a magnet-like ability to attract both public and private biotech facility investment, Frederick currently finds itself the site of a number of major biotech research construction projects.

Click on the image at right to view the Frederick Maryland Biotech Projects List.

The city is home to the U.S. Army base, Fort Dietrich, where the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is currently building the Integrated Research Laboratory. As found in Industrialinfo.com's Pharmaceutical Tracker - Online Database, the $105 million project will feature biosafety laboratory Levels 2, 3, and 4 (BSL-2, BSL-3 and BSL-4), with safeguards in place to prevent scientists and the environment from being exposed to microorganisms.

The 100,000-square-foot building will also include animal research laboratories, radiology equipment, mechanical space, and a waste-handling area. The new lab will allow NIAID to expand its development of diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines to protect the public against agents of bioterrorism. Targets of study are organisms that cause a variety of infectious diseases that could be used as bioweapons, including the plague, Lyme disease, rabies, tick-borne encephalitis, and the West Nile virus.

The Department of Homeland Security also chose Fort Detrick to build the $130 million National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC). Construction of the 160,000 square-foot-building is scheduled to begin in 2006 and be completed in 2009. As discussed in the 2005 Pharmaceutical Industry Forecast, with the continued threat of biowarfare, the federal government is expected to continue to fund literally dozens of similar labs across the country.

The private sector is also considering Frederick as the right place to invest its capital dollars. Vaccine manufacturer MedImmune (NYSE:MEDI) (Gaithersburg, Maryland) is currently conducting site studies for a vaccine manufacturing campus that could eventually reach a total investment value (TIV) of $450 million. The company currently has facilities in both Gaithersburg and Frederick.

Frederick scored another coup when government contractor BioPort LLC (Lansing, Michigan) decided the city was the best location for a nearly 200,000 square-foot manufacturing plant. As reported by Industrialinfo.com in December 2004, the company is investing over $90 million to renovate and equip a building to provide research and commercial manufacturing capacity for its anthrax vaccine, Biothrax.

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