Return to Virginia Business - March 2002

Think of Charlottesville and what comes to mind? Thomas Jefferson's refined architecture? Quiet college town? Haven for the wealthy? Hub for biotechnology?

Wait, it's true. Charlottesville is getting on the biotech map with new firms such as Biotage Inc. The small research company is the industry leader in drug discovery purification - a critical step in the manufacturing of medicine. As drug-making gets more sophisticated, pharmaceutical firms are using chemical reactions to make designer molecules that can be used to make new and better drugs. When this happens, though, there are waste byproducts that need to be cleaned up.

That's where Biotage comes in. "These reaction mixtures need to be purified, and the active ingredients isolated so they can be used in animal and human clinical trials," says Cheryl Duke, director of marketing for the company. "Globally, pharmaceutical companies are under pressure to create more novel therapeutic lead compounds and the No. 1 bottleneck is the purification step."

Cutting down the amount of time spent on cleaning and processing is essential. Biotage researchers have managed to compress the time it takes for purification from one day to 15 minutes. This feat has helped it grab market share. Although Biotage has three primary competitors, it has roughly 90 percent of the market share for its services. Its clients include such bigwigs as Merck, Pfizer, Glaxo Smith Kline and Bristol Meyers Squibb.

With offices in England, Germany and Japan, Biotage found Charlottesville a convenient spot for its headquarters. It is the hometown of Sheridan Snyder, who co-founded the firm in 1989 with Henry Blair as a spinoff of Massachusetts-based Dyax Corp. The town had other advantages as well - several of the company's 125 employees graduated from the nearby University of Virginia. And in January, Biotage broke ground on a new facility at U.Va.'s research park, which houses other pharmaceutical R&D firms.

- Leila Marija Ugincius