"What we don't know, and this is where the hype gets involved, is that [Janelia Farm] will lead to the immediate birth of an enormous commercial cluster of biotechnology companies ," said Larry Rosenstrauch, director of the Loudoun County Department of Economic Development. "If it does, I think it will take longer than a couple of years."
Hughes is important because Northern Virginia doesn't have a major research university, a big source of start-up companies. George Mason University is trying to pick up the slack. Its seven-year-old Manassas campus focuses on the life sciences. The school says it was the first to offer a degree in biodefense and still offers the only doctorate in this specialty.
The campus's National Center for Biodefense, with 200 graduate students, researches treatments for such biological threats as anthrax and smallpox, but it lacks a high-level lab for advanced research on the most dangerous strains that terrorists might use. Now it has to use less-virulent strains obtained from vaccines.
The university said it is applying to the federal government for $25 million toward construction of a $40 million advanced lab, but there's no guarantee that it will get the money or the lab will be built.
Virginia is also at a disadvantage in luring biotech business because it lacks enough wet labs -- labs with special plumbing, sophisticated ventilation and other features essential for biotech research. They're expensive to build, at about $300 a square foot, and private real estate developers are reluctant to take that big a risk. In recent years the state has lost as many as a dozen major projects for lack of wet labs, said Mark A. Herzog, executive director of the Virginia Biotechnology Association.
"There's just no way that a start-up company can fund the kind of lab space that they need to get off the ground," Herzog said. "And it's too expensive for the private investor to fund. It's a problem."
Herzog and other biotech advocates are pressing the commonwealth to provide up to $100 million in bonds to help public-private partnerships build wet lab space.
Another problem: Virginia's research parks and incubators are scattered over the state, not concentrated like Maryland's or North Carolina's, said Brandon J. Price, former chairman of Virginia's biotechnology association and now a vice president of drug distributor Cardinal Health in North Carolina.
That may be why Virginia has trouble attracting venture capital for biotech companies, said Jonathan M. Aberman, a venture capital lawyer at Fish & Richardson in the District. "Money will follow technology, but money will not lead technology," he said.
Fairfax County, ground zero for the region's information technology sector, has only a few small biotech companies, although it has gamely run a biotech incubator for two years. The building, where fledgling companies can get a deal on rent and other assistance, has turned out three companies so far.
"We'll get some biotech companies, but not a lot," said Gerald L. Gordon, president of Fairfax County's Economic Development Authority. "But we'll also get companies that do more information-technology related things like bioinformatics," performing the massive numbers-crunching that much biotech requires these days.
In Prince William County, only four biotech and pharmaceutical companies of any size exist so far, clustered around the George Mason campus. The biggest and splashiest is Indianapolis drug company Eli Lilly and Co. The commonwealth of Virginia and Prince William County paid more than $4 million and donated 2.5 acres to lure Lilly. The company will make insulin at a big plant it has promised to build, but it delayed construction from this summer to next year, saying construction costs turned out to be more than it expected. Lilly, like the others, will be a drug-producing factory, not a drug-inventing research center.
So how well Northern Virginia does in biotech depends a lot on Hughes and Janelia Farm.
"Howard Hughes is the unknown," said Alan G. Merten, president of George Mason University. "Will it be just a place that employs a small number of people, an island unto itself? Or will it be something much bigger?"
Shannon Henry is away. Her column, The Download, will return.
