Industry News

Xanthon Inc. has proposed building a new 80,000-sf facility in the Research Triangle Park area; the company currently occupies approximately 24,000 sf in three buildings in the Park Research Center there. The structure will house a state-of-the-art lab for R&D, Class 100 and 10,000 cleanroom manufacturing suites, engineering labs, and administrative office space.

BioStratum has worked with Kansas City-based Clark, Richardson & Biskup Consulting Engineers Inc. (CRB) in the development of process descriptions, process flow diagrams, process analysis, and cell culture scale-up options for BioStratum's early phase development recombinant proteins that will be expressed in cell culture.

Sandia/California National Laboratories plans to begin construction on the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory in April 2002. The $35.5-million, 70,400-sf R&D facility will house 130 scientists from a variety of fields collaborating on improving nuclear weapons monitoring and testing, which is carried out by computer simulations. Dekker/Perich/Sabatini of Albuquerque, N.M., was awarded the $1,562,000 design contract for the project.

Merix Bioscience Inc. will relocate in summer 2001 from an incubator at Becton Dickinson in Research Triangle Park, N.C., to a 20,000-sf Durham facility, formerly owned by Rhone Poulenc Rorer. Merix plans to conduct clinical trials of its new cancer vaccine at the facility.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to break ground in Cambridge on the $350-million McGovern Institute for Brain Research later in 2001. Other area institutions with similar facilities include McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., which will open a $10-million brain research wing, and the University of Massachusetts Medical Center's newly-opened $12-million Brudnick Neuropsychiatric Research Institute located at Worcester State Hospital in Worcester.