On the road to discoveries

Westchester County gives a tour of its burgeoning Life Science field

In Westchester, it’s not out of the ordinary to see groups of visitors arrive at tourist destinations like the Kykuit or Lyndhurst estates or perhaps Sleepy Hollow. But on a recent spring morning, the people filing off the bus in Tarrytown were arriving at a site that was far more non-descript from the outside while holding wonders of its own within.

The group was arriving at the labs for Sapience Therapeutics, a clinicalstage biotechnology company forging a new class of peptide-based cancer therapeutics for two presentations to kick off the first Life

“Experts like Dr. Cairo are a draw,” she says; startups and mid-sized companies will often look to position themselves near leaders like Cairo and others in Westchester to possibly collaborate with them, gaining credibility and experience.

Novick adds that the cluster of businesses and research centers are important in other ways. “Companies want to come where there’s an availability of talent—even for the accountants because you’ll find one who’s an expert in life science business—and employees know it’s less risky to move to a region because if their job doesn’t work out there are other companies there.”

The big magnet in that regard is Regeneron, the 35-year-old biotechnology company that has 4,000 employees in the region and continues to expand its footprint. “Regeneron is a fantastic asset and gives us credibility,” Novick says, but while a visit to their lab and campus anchored the tour, she adds that the company was a hook to show off the broader array of activity. “All of this spotlighting work is ‘Regeneron plus…’ saying, ‘Since we have your attention…’” The tour began with start-up Sapience, which was a start-up in New York Medical College’s BioInc@ NYMC incubator, which has expanded rapidly and moved into its new digs last December; and Retia Medical, which developed the Argos Cardiac Output (CO) Monitor for advanced hemodynamic monitoring of high-risk patients.

Sapience founder and CEO

20,000 square feet, as well as about the college and Westchester County Medical Center campus, followed by a drive around the grounds to see buildings like a new pavilion built in 2019.

Next up was a visit to two neighbors, Leviant Inc. and Clarapth Inc. Leviant CEO and co-founder David Eigen showed off the company’s patented Focused Multivector UltraViolet Light equipment which disinfects hospital rooms, killing 99.9% of infectious pathogens in under two minutes; the company, which had $2 million in sales last year and expects to triple that this year, is currently redesigning its equipment to make it even more flexible and space efficient, Eigen said. (They are currently raising about $7 million in growth equity.)

A tour of Clarapath showed off SectionStar, the first, fully automated, all-in-one tissue sectioning and transfer system that increases capacity, reliability, and consistency—this is an especially crucial development because New York has a shortage of histotechnologists who can even handle slides in the old-fashioned time-consuming manner by hand. “The biopsy backlog is a public health crisis no one talks about,” says president and CEO Eric Feinstein, who added that their machine will not only speed up the process dramatically but will dramatically reduce human error. “We’re at an inflection point, with an aging population, higher incidences of cancer and labor shortages and we’re flying blind.”

The penultimate stop was Regeneron, the county’s superstar, which senior director Marcus Jones noted had been named the top biotech company in the world six of the last twelve years by Science Magazine. He said the company, which develops all products in-house, has had nine federally approved drugs but with 35 products now in clinical development, they hope to double that total in ten years.

The company debuted its genetics center in 2013, which was the highlight of the tour but there’s plenty more to come. Regeneron is planning a major expansion of eight new buildings and more than 3.5 million square feet of construction over 14.5 acres, including its own power plant, a daycare center and other amenities like an event space and buildings that put science on display, says Ben Suzuki, Executive Director, Real Estate & Facilities Management. “We want to celebrate science.”

Sciences Tour organized by Westchester County; the guests on the tour included representatives from Empire State Development who fund projects, organizations with investors, and other interested parties.

“This was an awareness campaign,” says director of economic development Bridget Gibbons. “We want to make people in New York City and in Westchester aware of the globally significant scientific research and development going on here. It’s too well kept a secret.”

Deborah Novick, the county’s director of entrepreneurship and innovation, says the government can help bring people together to invest, create start-ups or foster collaborations. “We want to let the outside world know about what is happening in our key sectors,” she explains. “These people might know developers or start-ups or investors who might start a business or move here if they understand there’s a lot of vibrant activity and support from the county government.”

Westchester, which has more than 8,000 life science jobs, is becoming known for therapeutics and robotics with a lot of research going on in cancer and brain issues, both Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injuries. But Novick and Gibbons say that this is happening organically; even when they choose winners from the competitive entry for the county’s biotechnology accelerator program— which offers six months of free, personalized founder education and which has created 62 jobs and raised $15 million—they are not picking thematically.

“We don’t interfere with the market,” Gibbons says. “It’s natural selection.”

The tour served two purposes—showing how close the labs and research centers are to Manhattan but also how close together they all are to each other. Gibbons points to world-renowned experts like Dr. Mitchell Cairo, a leader in pediatric oncology research at Westchester Medical Center and New York Medical College, who gave a talk on the tour.

Barry Kappel explained that scientists understand a lot about why cells become cancerous but it remains difficult to target them with drugs; his experiments have been developing stabilized peptides to penetrate the cells; if these new therapeutics improve effectiveness, this approach has the added advantage of being far less toxic than radiation or chemotherapy.

Marc Zemel, co-founder and CEO of Retia Medical, explained how their monitor is an early detection system for when patients are oxygen deprived, providing better outcomes at lower cost by finding problems before disaster strikes. (He says it’s 50 percent more accurate than the nearest rival.) Retia raised $15 million a year last year to expand their business and has grown to 20 employees; Zemel says the hospital not only improves care and saves hospitals money but it has a high-profit margin.

The next stop was the biotechnology incubator (BioInc@NYMC) at New York Medical College, where the first speaker was Dr. Robert Amler, a dean at the school, who explained that the incubator not only provides lab space but high-tech freezers a start-up could not easily afford. He credits Kappel and Sapience with putting the program on a map. “Barry showed you could start with an idea and make something happen,” he says. “This is real people making real discoveries.” There were several other speakers including Dr. Cairo, who discussed cell therapy as the future for curing once-intractable diseases like sickle cell anemia; he told the story of a six-year-old boy on a ventilator who received experimental trial treatment and was cured and is now a high school football star en route to Harvard University.

The discussion also included information about the expansion of the BioInc space, which has recently doubled in size and is approaching

Before the evening reception, the bus made one last stop at the non-profit research center Burke Neurological Institute, where Dr. Rajiv Ratan talked about the looming epidemic of brain issues from traumatic brain injuries and dementia. “In Westchester at

Neurocures New York, we have industry, government and academia coming together to solve problems,” he said. A group of postdocs then explained their experiences and their work before leading a tour of BNI’s labs.

Overall, Gibbons says, the tour was a tremendous success. “We’ve gotten such great feedback that we’ll probably start doing this twice a year,” she says. The next one is planned for October.

“There is so much happening here that we’ll have other companies to show off on the next tour,” Novick added.