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HUDSON VALLEY BECOMES BIOTECH HOT SPOT
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Just off the tree-lined Saw Mill River Parkway about a half hour outside of New York City, a former Union Carbide facility in Tarrytown is quickly becoming a hotbed for emerging biotech firms. More than a half-dozen biopharmaceutical firms are hard at work in the sprawling complex – now known as the Landmark at Eastview – developing everything from a cure for cancer to new drugs to treat obesity.
One of those companies, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, could serve as the poster child of the region’s meteoric rise on the nation’s list of biotech hot spots. Founded in 1988 by Leonard S. Schliefer, M.D., Ph.D., the company got its start in a tiny studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but quickly outgrew its tight quarters and looked for space to expand outside the city. The Landmark was the perfect fit because it had existing laboratories, was close to the city and had plenty of space at a fraction of the cost of comparable space in the city.
Today, Regeneron employs 430 people at its Tarrytown headquarters working in 20 times the amount of space it originally leased. With an additional 250 people working in a manufacturing facility upstate, the publicly traded company has several product candidates progressing through all states of human clinical trials for the potential treatment of obesity, rheumatoid arthritis and cancer.
Now neighbors to Regeneron are a bevy of other biotech firms: Progenics Pharmaceuticals, Emisphere Technologies and Aton Pharma. Acorda Therapeutics, Gene Link and several other biopharmaceutical companies are a stone’s throw away.
“The Hudson Valley is still flying below the radar screen when it comes to biotech, but 20 years from now, you may be able to look back and see that treatments for all kinds of diseases – from HIV to cancer – stemmed from pioneering work done in two adjacent zip codes: 10591 and 10532,” said Anthony Campagiorni, president and CEO of the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation, an organization charged with recruiting additional biotech investment to an eight-county region that stretches from just beyond New York City nearly to Albany.
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