INDOOR Biotechnologies: Blazing a path for spinoffs

by Timothy Sprinkle
Virginia Business
December 2005

Dr. Martin Chapman didn’t set out to be a businessman. He was always the scientist; a tenured professor of microbiology and medicine at the University of Virginia with more than 20 years of laboratory experience.

That all changed in 1997, when Chapman decided to split off from the university and take his allergen research public. The resulting company, INDOOR Biotechnologies (IB), has grown into one of the leading biotech companies in Central Virginia, providing services and expertise to air-quality and allergy researchers all over the world.

Dr. Martin Chapman

“We’ve developed a number of tests of allergen measurements that have been used by research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, allergen manufacturers, and so on,” says Chapman. He explains that, in addition to its testing tools, the company serves as a reference lab for air-quality companies and creates synthetic allergens for use in a variety of laboratory studies.

It’s a very specific niche, and one that’s proved lucrative for IB. Begun as little more than a “virtual company” with one employee, the company has grown steadily during the past several years. It now employs 16 specialists in offices in Charlottesville and Cardiff, Wales. IB officials anticipate companywide revenue of about $2 million this year. In fact, revenue has grown about 20 percent a year for the past four years. IB recently moved into a new 5,500-square-foot research space near downtown Charlottesville in an effort to accommodate its growing business. Chapman left the university in 2001 to focus on the company full time. “To some extent, our research was becoming increasingly product-oriented before we even left the university,” he says. “We were producing reagents and tools people needed.”

He is optimistic about the company’s future growth. “So far, we’ve got the market pretty much wrapped up,” he says. “I’d say we supply probably 90 percent of the studies that are done on allergens worldwide.”

Charlottesville's spin-off companies such as IB — which often get their start in U.Va.’s research labs — have become an increasingly important part of the Charlottesville-Albemarle County economy in recent years. Not only do these firms create a variety of new, high-tech jobs, but their concentration in Central Virginia helps attract outside businesses that may be looking for a tech-savvy hometown.

This sector has proved so active that the university set up Spinner Technologies, a for-profit subsidiary of the University of Virginia Patent Foundation, in 2000 to help budding faculty entrepreneurs make the jump from the academic to the commercial world. “We provide an outlet for those select few faculty members who want to have this creative outlet, to have this ability to extend beyond their confines of academia,” says Andrea Alms, Spinner's general manager. “And what they’re doing is good work. These people want to keep their day jobs — they love teaching, they love research — but they also want to see the fruits of their labor help and save lives; so Spinner helps with that.”

For Chapman, who now is eight years into his commercial experiment, the transition to the business world has been a positive experience. “I think there’s a fair amount of overlap of the qualities you need to be successful in science and some of the qualities you need to be successful in business,” he says. "You have to have the same kind of drive or passion to do both. I’ve actually very much enjoyed the creative side of running the business.”