The muddy field at the corner of Virginia and Ellicott streets will sprout new medical research buildings this year, replacing backhoes and bulldozers.

The $160 million research complex rising north of downtown will be complete in 2005, and scientists are already being drawn to the Buffalo area. Newly created posts at the University at Buffalo, Roswell Park Cancer Institute and other research centers are strengthening the region’s scientific muscle.

In just a couple of years, much of the foundation for a life sciences industry has gone into place, or is on the way.

But if Buffalo is going to spawn a biotech boomtown from its industrial DNA, more of its research know-how needs to move off campus — and into commercial products at job-generating companies, industry experts say.

"One of the biggest challenges is to achieve the startup of new companies,” says Alan Olhoeft, chief operating officer of the bio-tech booster group BuffLink. “This isn't short-term — the region needs to motivate entrepreneurs.”

Biotechnology remains a promising industry for regions that seek a new economic future. Firms in the industry are growing their employment an average of 12.3 percent a year, according to a Commerce Department study in October. The industry saw sales grow 10 percent in 2002 while profits soared 14 percent, twice as fast as other industries, according to a report by Commerce’s Office of Technology Policy. Even during the recession year of 2001, biotech sales grew modestly, while other industries saw sales shrink.

"Large pharmaceutical manufacturers are looking for innovation and creativity in research . . . they know that’s where their growth is going to come from,” said Gene DePrez, team leader for IBM Corp.’s Global Location Strategies business consulting group in New York.

That’s good news for people hoping to spawn a flock of startup firms here.

Some entrepreneurs, like Paul Buckley, president of Applied Sciences Group, are developing computer applications for the emerging biotechnology industry. In doing so, he hopes to build a bridge between the local information technology firms and the life sciences companies.

But the biotech industry —largely made up of scientific research and development companies and pharmaceutical and medical manufacturing firms — is also highly concentrated, the federal report said, making it harder for emerging areas to carve themselves a slice. More than 25 percent of the industry is located in California, and most of the remainder is in other traditional strongholds like Massachusetts and Maryland.

For Buffalo, now is the time for high-powered research to spark more startup companies and jobs in the private sector, according to industry experts locally. But that takes seed money and entrepreneurs, two ingredients that Western New York is short on.

"We feel one of the region’s priorities should be to fill the funding gap,” Olhoeft said.

This year the group hopes to see the launch of a venture capital fund that’s dedicated to local life science ventures. BuffLink envisions a fund that provides interim management — as well as capital — to help scientists with the business aspects of drug discovery. Bio-tech tends to be capital intensive — research consumes 12 percent of the industry’s sales, compared with 5 percent for other businesses, according to the Commerce Department report.

The region’s push to augment its ailing smokestack economy with an injection of biotech vitality began in 2001. That was the year that the University at Buffalo was picked to host an advanced Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics. Leveraging knowledge from the mapping of the human genome, bioinformatics aims for a deeper understanding of human biology —and gaining tips for cures and treatments for what ails mankind.

The Life Sciences Complex, a trio of buildings to house new research centers, is going up in the medical campus north of downtown. The complex will provide 400,000 square feet of research space — and the national bragging rights that go with a new, state-of-the-art facility. A data link will connect the center to UB’s supercomputer center in Amherst, among the nation’s most powerful number crunchers for academic research.

Scheduled for completion early next year are the University at Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute’s Structural Biology Research Center, and Roswell Park Cancer Institute Center for Genetics and Pharmacology.
The new centers are part of a 100-acre Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, which encompasses Kaleida’s Buffalo General Hospital and other medical heavyweights. Medicine is already a large industry in Buffalo, according to the BNMC. The institutions in the medical campus employ 6,200 people and pump $260 million in paychecks into the local economy.

While the new research buildings are still under way, the region’s bioscience efforts have already stepped up their activity. Since 2001, area institutions have hired more than 180 new life science researchers, according to a BuffLink survey. Funding from the National Institutes of Health, which sponsors life science research, has grown 37 percent, to $84.5 million in 2002.

And the process of spinning off research breakthroughs into lab developments has begun, with 18 biotech startups having opened their doors in the past few years, according to BuffLink.

e-mail: fwilliams@buffnews.com