17 minute read
Biotech Boom
Biotech Boom
The Manchester Millyard is becoming a global hotspot for making human tissue and organs
By Mike Cote
As a center of industry, Manchester, New Hampshire, was spun into existence from cotton in the 1800s. Its future may be woven by the strands of human life.
Textiles elevated the Queen City into a global powerhouse for nearly a century. By the early 1900s, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company operated a textile mill complex along the Merrimack River that employed 17,000 people, encompassed 30 buildings and was the biggest in the world.
After Amoskeag shut down in 1936 — bankrupted by the Great Depression, labor strikes and competition — manufacturing continued in the Millyard, but the city never reclaimed its glory. Giant buildings sat vacant until they began filling up again in the 1980s with a new wave of high-tech, business services and education tenants.
Is Manchester ready to rise again? We’re not talking about bettering Boston. We’re talking about conquering the world.
Last fall, the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI) became a federal Tech Hub, one of 31 chosen by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The effort, launched by inventor Dean Kamen in 2017 with $80 million from the Department of Defense, could secure millions more in federal funds toward the mass production of human tissue and organs.
Kamen, whose inventions include a portable insulin pump, a wheelchair that climbs stairs, a bionic prosthetic arm and the Segway scooter, recognized Manchester’s potential in the early 1980s and began buying up buildings in the Millyard to establish a research and development company.
ARMI could lead to the creation of 9,000 jobs and make the city an epicenter for biotech research and fabrication, proponents say. Partners include the cities of Manchester and Nashua, the University of New Hampshire Manchester, Manchester Community College and more than 200 ARMI member companies in the biotech industry across the country.
Second- and third-generation Manchester residents — the descendants of immigrants from Canada, Ireland, Poland and other nations — remember the mills as the place where their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, uncles and aunts, clocked in for long days making fabric, shoes and other products.
Now ARMI needs to groom a new generation of workers to ramp up the production of human organs. If it takes hold, the biotech revolution could upend the health care industry and lead to cures built with blueprints created from a patient’s own cells.
Betting on biotech
On the morning of a photo shoot of Dean Kamen and his biotech team at the ARMI Tissue Foundry in November, Kamen is the last to arrive and doesn’t have much to say. Maybe it’s because he’s about to hop on a plane to Washington, D.C., to talk with federal officials about another project and is pressed for time.
While his colleagues exchange early morning banter and feign poses, Kamen sits still. Gathered around him are the team heading up ARMI: Tom Bollenbach, chief technology officer; Maureen Toohey, deputy executive director; Jennifer MacDonald, chief operating officer; and Julie Lenzer, chief innovation officer.
In October, Kamen and the team gathered with community partners and political leaders to celebrate the designation of ARMI/BioFabUSA as a federal Tech Hub. The U.S. Department of Commerce expects to invest $50 million to $75 million in five to 10 hubs chosen from among the 31 named to the program.
Momentum has been building. In 2020, the ARMI project secured $44 million from the Economic Development Administration as part of the Build Back Better Regional Challenge. But in an industry where blockbuster drugs can top $1 billion to develop, all those millions are just seed money to jump-start the creation of an entirely new industry.
Ask Kamen to talk about ARMI before he catches his plane to Washington, and the few minutes he consents to stretches to nearly half an hour. Now he’s all smiles, as if he’s stepped onto a stage to present a speech he’s made many times before.
Kamen compares the evolution of ARMI to the development of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), the nonprofit he founded in 1989 that builds student interest in science through robotics competitions. FIRST, also headquartered in the Millyard, now attracts teams from all over the world.
“It’s got hundreds of people at headquarters and thousands of people around the country, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers and millions of kids. But for the first five or six years, just like (ARMI), FIRST was pretty much nurtured without any of its own staff,” says Kamen, who also operates DEKA, his research and development company, in the Millyard.
“It was all done by volunteers and my support team inside DEKA,” he says. “But now it's up and running, and it's on its own, and I'm hoping ARMI will do the same thing.”
ARMI in the spotlight
Kamen says members of his DEKA team have been “on loan” to the ARMI project, a practice that may have blurred the lines between his private and nonprofit ventures. An investigation last fall by New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) and APM Reports examined the ARMI project’s use of federal funds and Kamen’s business relationships. The article by Todd Bookman uncovered no legal wrongdoing on Kamen’s part but included calls for greater transparency on how the public tax money is being used.
During an interview before the NHPR report was published, Kamen, 72, acknowledged how much ARMI’s momentum has depended upon him and the connections he’s made over the years in business and government.
It also has depended on the real estate Kamen has amassed in the Millyard, including the 150 Dow St. building he bought last year for $23 million with a business partner. ARMI plans to dedicate about 25 percent of the five-story, 400,000-square-foot building space to biofabrication manufacturing — an important step toward promoting the regional brand of “ReGen Valley.”
“As the White House said, ReGen Valley will be the epicenter of a whole new industry, but only if the local community embraces it,” Kamen says. “Individual citizens, the education community, the government community, the business community, have to realize that we have to hang together and build this thing as quickly as we can. My personal efforts are not going to be enough to continue to do this.”
The $80 million from the Department of Defense required matching contributions in funding and in-kind services. Kamen was able to secure $214 million worth of additional support, primarily from corporations that were early supporters of FIRST, including Rockwell Automation and Boston Scientific. Their executives serve on the ARMI board of directors.
“What you need is a network of people that are trying to do the right thing for the right reason, and I think ARMI is proof of that,” Kamen says. “But it's got to grow up, and it's got to be out on its own. It's got to stop depending on me.”
Kamen fears bigger states with more resources will see the path ARMI is taking and run with it.
“We've proven that you can start making at-scale cells, tissues and organs. What I'm afraid of is now that we’ve essentially de-risked it, essentially laid out a detailed road map to create an industry where still we're growing fast, but we’re still so tiny compared to the resources at some major medical complexes in New York, in Texas, in California, that they're going to look at our road map, and they're going to say, ‘Hey, we can do that.’ ”
Lifesaving technologies converge
An 80,000-square-foot mill building at 100 Commercial St. recently occupied by Texas Instruments is now home to a single tenant that needed to expand. United Therapeutics, led by CEO and ARMI board member Martine Rothblatt, makes 3D-printed organ scaffolds for manufactured organs that are being developed for transplant.
Rothblatt, whose resume includes co-founding Sirius Satellite Radio, established United Therapeutics in 1996 to save her 10-year-old daughter from a deadly lung disease. The company developed an experimental medicine licensed from Glaxo Wellcome.
"If I didn’t figure out a solution, she was going to die,” Rothblatt said during a 2018 interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader. “The odds were, even with my effort, she was going to (die) because I probably wouldn't have succeeded. But I got lucky, I did succeed."
United Therapeutics, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, employs about 1,000 people at seven locations in the U.S. and Canada. The publicly traded company generated revenues of $1.9 billion in 2022.
“If we didn’t have her, I don't think ARMI would be here at all,” Kamen says. “It certainly wouldn't be moving as fast as it is. And she has decided to make that building in this Millyard the first place on this planet in which you have an entire building dedicated to one and only one thing: manufacturing replacement human organs.”
Rothblatt is working with Kamen to bring vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft to Manchester, which Kamen hopes will originate from space in the Millyard. It would deliver freshly made human organs to hospitals around the region and eventually around the country.
Those organs would be custom-made for the patients who would receive them. People who receive human organ transplants now must take powerful immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives so that their bodies do not reject the organs. Researchers working with ARMI aim to manufacture organs that are populated by the cells of the intended recipient, ending the dependency on such drugs.
“This is a replacement organ, but it’s sort of like getting a replacement part for your car from the original equipment manufacturer. You don’t need an adapter plate,” Kamen says. “It's going to have your DNA in it. Your body won't reject it.”
The Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute is part of a growing life sciences industry in the Granite State that generated $4.3 billion in sales in 2021 and represents 11,290 jobs, with average salaries of $130,848 per year, according to a report last June by the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs.
The newly formed New Hampshire Life Sciences cited that data in January, when the trade association announced its inaugural founding members: Novocure, a global oncology company that has its North American flagship in Portsmouth; and Novo Nordisk, a global health care company with operations in West Lebanon.
“New Hampshire Life Sciences has been kind of operating in the underground for several years,” says Andrea Hechavarria, its president and CEO. “There's been a group of business leaders in the state that have been really trying to get this off the ground just because of the growth of the industry and the promise of the industry and its economic opportunity to the state of New Hampshire.”
Taylor Caswell, commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs, says the new trade group could help New Hampshire best take advantage of a fast-growing business segment that includes ARMI.
“Just government telling everybody that this is a nice place for life science only gets you so far,” Caswell says. “You’ve got to have a consolidated and collaborative private sector to also help tell that story.”
New Hampshire has been attracting life sciences companies in recent years that need to find space for biomanufacturing. Those companies see the state as a place where they can attract workers from neighboring New England states, Caswell says.
“A lot of the life science industry in the eastern U.S. is locked up in urban areas, and they're at points where at some point they need to build things,” he says. “We’re seeing that kind of activity, where the company might not be physically moving here, but they might be opening some biomanufacturing-type operations.”
Building a new workforce
The ARMI project and its workforce needs was the subject of a panel talk during a two day economic summit in November hosted by the Greater Manchester Chamber.
You could blame the light attendance in the meeting room at the DoubleTree Hotel on the Friday afternoon timing, but it underscores how Manchester’s biggest story has yet to break through to the mainstream.
Among the 30 or so people gathering to listen to a four-member panel moderated by Chamber Chair Matt Cookson were several people connected to the project, including Jodie Nazaka, the city’s economic development director, and Brian Bricknell, president of Manchester Community College.
On stage with Cookson at the DoubleTree were Jennifer MacDonald, ARMI’s chief operating officer; Ashley Marcoux, executive director of the newly formed NextGen Manchester Resiliency Council; Mike Decelle, dean of the UNH College of Professional Studies and campus director of UNH Manchester; and Stephen Thiel, assistant vice president of community impact at Southern New Hampshire University.
MacDonald, who is both a physician and a veteran, said workforce training, such as an apprenticeship program already underway, is essential to ARMI’s success.
“ARMI's mission is to develop a diverse, scalable, capable ecosystem for the manufacture of cells, tissues and organs. And yes, that may sound a bit like science fiction, but it is very real and very present,” said MacDonald, who previously served as senior adviser to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C.
“Just blocks from where we’re sitting right now, we are developing what are becoming lifesaving therapies," she said.
Some of those therapies are already reaching patients.
“One that started this year is a regenerative bone therapy for those who have had maxillofacial trauma, or a jaw injury, or head and neck or throat cancer, and need regenerative restoration of their facial features,” MacDonald said. “There is a product on the market now, and making it to hospitals and making it to real patients, restoring form and function and quality of life for real people. This is right now. This is not only possible, but it’s actually happening.”
Decelle, who served as ARMI’s chief workforce officer for six years, says the region needs to make a long-term commitment to education and workforce development for ARMI to build a new industry here.
“Far too often, what causes an ecosystem to either not take root or to fade after a promising early start is the inability of that ecosystem to attract or produce a workforce that can enable its growth,” said Decelle, mentioning the success of Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Research Triangle in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Silicon Valley in California; and other high-tech hubs.
“Ask the average venture capitalist ... It’s because they know that they can build companies out there,” Decelle said. “They will not say it’s because of the technology there.”
Attracting investors
Former Dyn CEO Jeremy Hitchock is among the local entrepreneurs supporting the project. The managing partner of New North Ventures attended an investors summit in October hosted by ARMI that included 21 new companies from across the United States.
Hitchcock and Colin Van Ostern, who serves on the NextGen Manchester Resiliency Council, made a pitch for ARMI in an op-ed published in NH Business Review in November. They cited startup companies working on curative therapies for diabetes, heart failure, vision loss and other diseases.
And the game has just begun: “In the story of this emerging industry, we are in the earliest of innings,” Hitchcock and Van Ostern wrote.
While that may be true, New Hampshire is home to long-established life sciences companies. Novocure, which makes devices that use electrical fields to kill cancer cells, has made Portsmouth its U.S. flagship for nearly 20 years.
Bill Doyle, the company’s chairman, likens the connections between Portsmouth, Cambridge, Mass., and Manchester to the growth of Silicon Valley, “where you have Stanford in the middle, but you’ve got startups, you’ve got big companies, you’ve got banks, you’ve got venture capitalists, you’ve got accountants, you’ve got lobbyists, and each piece of the ecosystem is necessary to bring the innovation from the lab to patients.”
ARMI is helping to expand that ecosystem, Doyle says.
“What Dean’s doing at ARMI is, first and foremost, expanding the critical mass here, and critical mass is important. He’s adding a research component and connecting it with his Millyard with everything that he’s built over 30 years at DEKA, the University of New Hampshire satellite that’s there, and 1 million square feet of mill space just ready for entrepreneurs.”
Kamen credits New Hampshire’s congressional delegation for supporting ARMI and helping to secure funding. State and local government also have been instrumental, he says.
ARMI will need even more champions if Manchester wants to become known worldwide as the go-to shop for a new kidney, heart or lung.
“Every great new entity starts with a small investment by people with vision and people with courage, until the rest of the world realizes, ‘We've got to get behind this thing,’” Kamen says. “But it takes that kind of leadership.”
