The Colorado Bioscience Park (Aurora, CO, USA), located at the former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center on Denver's eastern flank, will take a big leap forward in June when faculty from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (UCHSC, Denver) move into the first of two 600,000 square-foot research towers on the site. This also marks a milestone in the UCHSC and Medical School's move to its new Aurora campus on the same site, a transition that will be complete by 2007. The 15 biotech companies in the park are expected to benefit greatly because of this new easy access to university basic researchers and clinical settings.

The largest biosciences park in the US is preparing to accept academic tenants. Credit: Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority

When the US Army announced in 1995 that it was closing Fitzsimons, the city of Aurora and UCHSC wasted little time in putting together a joint proposal to turn the 578-acre site into the largest university-associated bioscience park in the nation. Within three years, several biotech startups had moved into renovated lab space filled with free equipment that Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority had gotten on the cheap from the Army, and today the Colorado Bioscience Park is home to one-person startups and companies such as FeRx that have drugs in human clinical trials (see Table 1). In the interim, the university opened outpatient clinics, an eye center, a cancer center and a Native American health center at the Aurora site, and early this year the Veteran's Administration received Congressional approval to relocate its Denver Veterans Administration Hospital to Fitzsimons.

Table 1 Biotech companies located at Colorado Bioscience Park
Full size table

"The opening of the [UCHSC] research tower will be a great milestone for the campus here and for all of us who have companies out here," says Tim Rodell, CEO of GlobeImmune, one of the park's early tenants. "Having the research faculty out here will be a big plus in terms of access to expertise, having seminars and just reaching critical mass." An added bonus will be state-of-the-art instrumentation, such as a new 900-MHz NMR spectrometer, to which private companies at Fitzsimons will have shared access as official UCHSC affiliates.

Colorado has had its ups and downs over the years as a place for biotechs to do business, most of that centered in Boulder, home to the University of Colorado but a difficult city to start a company because of high costs. "I wouldn't say that Boulder was the entire reason that biotech failed to live up to its potential here in Colorado, but the facilities here at Fitzsimons really lowers the activation barrier to starting a company, and that should prove to be a big incentive," says Rodell, a former CEO of financially troubled Cortech (Boulder). The park is in a State Enterprise Zone, which gives companies multiple tax breaks in addition to other perks (see Box 1).

Several features of the Colorado Bioscience Park make this campus unique among the 23 bioparks in the US, but chief among them is the nearly unlimited potential for growth and expansion on a site immediately adjoining a major academic medical center. "With 160 acres reserved for commercial biotech development, the park offers plenty of room for expansion, something that's not available in biotech centers such as Boston, San Francisco or San Diego," explains Jill Farnham, acting director of the Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority.

Equally important is the way the facilities at the park are structured to nurture growing companies. A new building on the campus, named Bioscience Park Center, has 60,000 square feet of office and ready-to-occupy lab space that can serve companies at each stage of development until they are ready to build their own facilities on the campus. Leases are structured with the expectation that a company will grow from shared office space, suitable for a scientist developing a business plan, to a single lab to multiple labs, and larger. "We doubled our lab space just by opening the door to the empty lab next to us," notes Mike Browning, CEO of PhosphoSolutions, a profitable provider of monoclonal antibodies that moved into the Bioscience Park in 2001. "We didn't have to wait for lab space to be built or renovated, and we didn't have to renegotiate our lease." The result is a minimum of downtime and disruption. "It's energy we can spend on mission-critical tasks. We don't have to oversee construction projects," added Rodell.

With the existing space nearing capacity, a second facility is set to open next year with an additional 25,000 square feet of lab and office space; already, three companies are wait-listed for the space. In addition, the UCHSC will open its new research library in 2006 and a second 600,000 square-foot research tower in 2007; a third building with 40,000 square feet of space is in the planning stages.