Posted on 06/18/2004 4:59:32 AM PDT by wmichgrad
DETROIT (AP) — Officials for Asterand Inc., a human tissue bank, are hoping that the city's moderate wages and laboratory costs will help it become one of the top firms in its field.
Detroit's pool of scientists, lab technicians and supply chain experts, plus the state's financial support of life-science companies, have also helped Asterand become one of the fastest-growing young biotech companies in the United States, company officials said.
"Moving to Detroit is the best thing that's happened in my commercial life," founder and chief executive officer Randal Charlton told Tom Walsh of the Detroit Free Press for a Friday column.
Sometime in the next two weeks, Charlton and his 40 employees in Detroit will move into new space in TechOne, the first building to open in TechTown, Wayne State University's technology park. Since the company's formation in 2000, the staff has worked from labs on three floors of a building about a mile away.
In 1984, Charlton came to America and met Alan Walton, then chief executive officer of University Genetics Co., who recruited Charlton to work with him. Today Walton is a senior partner in Oxford Biosciences Partners, a venture capital firm and investor in Asterand.
Charlton was involved in several different ventures during the 1990s, but found himself talking with Walton a few years ago about the mapping of the human genome.
"Alan said the genome project would bring about enormous demand for human tissue," Charlton recalled, "from drug companies to academic researchers studying disease."
Charlton volunteered to do research on where best to locate a world bank of genetic material that would be procured from places across the globe.
It didn't have to be in Detroit, but it did have to be done on a low-cost basis, he said.
He came to Michigan after reading about the state's life-sciences corridor, funded by $50 million in tobacco settlement money. Officials at Wayne State gave him a warm welcome and Asterand was formed in May of 2000.
Other tissue bank firms had already been formed in the late 1990s, but are only now reaching profitability.
Charlton expects Asterand to become profitable in this, its fifth year of operation.
Moderate wages and lab costs in Detroit help keep expenses down, yet the company finds the quality of available talent to be very high.
Asterand will soon move about 50,000 tissue samples, either frozen or embedded in paraffin, to its new building. Revenue from selling samples to researchers and related work with genetic materials has reached about $1 million a month so far this year, Charlton said.
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