Bioscience Leaps & Bounds By Bob Luder, photos by Steven Hertzog
The Bioscience and Technology Business Center pharmaceutical companies continue to make advancements in technology and biosciences, and are confident the next 10 years will far exceed the last. It’s long been believed that, according to laws of accelerating returns, the pace of technological progress throughout the world increases exponentially as time passes because of common forces driving it forward. After all, technology is an evolutionary process, and being exponential, it’s widely believed, is all about evolution. So it has been for technological and scientific advancements over the last decade or so in the Lawrence area. The proof lies in the leaps forward by three local companies/organizations that have made great technological strides and meaningful advancements in the areas of biosciences and pharmaceuticals. The Bioscience and Technology Business Center, located on the University of Kansas West Campus and an incubator for entrepreneurial start-up companies in the bioscience and tech realms, has more than doubled its tenant companies and more than quadrupled aggregate payroll since launching around 2010. During the next 15 years, it plans on adding 600,000 to 800,000 square feet of space 60
in a new KU Innovation Park that will rival any such facility in the country. Deciphera Pharmaceuticals, a downtown Lawrence company that develops cancer-fighting drugs using kinase inhibitors, received approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in mid-2020 for its first medication, QINLOCK, for the treatment of patients with gastrointestinal stromal tumors. Deciphera has three additional oncology drugs currently in clinical trials, including Vimseltinib, Rebastinib and DCC-3116. The company has multiple research programs in its pipeline for the next wave of cancer-fighting drugs in the years to come. CritiTech Particle Engineering Solutions, which largely works with existing drugs to make them more efficiently absorbed and delivered in the body, also has a number of cancer-fighting drugs in development, two of which are in clinical trials. In recent years, the company has constructed and developed facilities in North Lawrence, which continue to grow and are expected to expand through the next decade.
