Industry News

The Interim Central Reference Laboratory opened its BSL-3 facility in Odessa, Ukraine, in June of 2010. Created in alliance with the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the biocontainment facility will enable scientists to secure and eliminate weapons of mass destruction in former Soviet states. The Interim Central Reference Laboratory will also support research on infectious diseases and pathogens. Other BSL-3 facilities are under construction in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham opened the 50,000-sf Hazelrig-Salter Radiation Oncology Center in June of 2010. The patient-centered facility offers advanced radiation treatment and radiosurgery, and houses evaluation rooms, linear accelerators, and an imaging suite with a 16-slice CT scanner.

Electric Boat will create a submarine R&D Center at the site of Pfizer World Research’s former headquarters in New London, Conn. The global center for submarine excellence will house engineering and design space for the next generation of ballistic-missile submarines. The complex will be occupied in phases from July of 2010 through 2011.

Dow Kokam broke ground on a $600 million battery manufacturing facility in June of 2010 in Midland, Mich. Supported by $161 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the 800,000-sf  project will produce lithium-ion battery packs for hybrid and electric vehicles. The facility will house up to 800 employees. Dow Kokam is a joint venture between Dow Chemical Co. and TK Advanced Battery LLC.

The University of Mississippi will construct a second research facility at the Thad Cochran Research Center in Oxford, Miss. Providing expanded research space for the university's National Center for Natural Products Research, the building will include FDA clinical research labs and a botanical specimen repository.  The project is supported by $31.7 million in funding from three federal agencies. Completion is expected in summer of 2013.