Gov. Don Carcieri’s public backing of a massive new center for biotechnology
at the University of Rhode Island has given a boost to a proposal that has been
on the drawing board for years.
Carcieri’s recently announced budget for 2004 pledges $300,000 to begin design of the new Center for Biotechnology and Molecular Biosciences at URI. He also unveiled the project’s price tag: $50 million, to be funded through state bonds.
The project will require voter approval via a statewide referendum in 2004 – provided the Legislature approves the referendum, either during this legislative session or next year.
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Jeff Seemann, dean of URI’s College of Environment and Life Sciences, said he hopes the Legislature will approve the ballot question this year. He added that Carcieri’s request for an additional $300,000 in planning funds for 2004 ($200,000 was approved for this year) would “make the building happen that much faster.”
The proposed facility, which would be built in the northern portion of URI’s Kingston campus, would offer URI’s molecular biologists, biochemists and other scientists cutting-edge infrastructure to explore plant, marine and natural-resource and other environmental sciences.
More broadly, the facility would raise URI’s stature – and with it Rhode Island’s – as a hotbed of biotechnology research and innovation, Seemann said.
“We see this as an investment in the university to help promote economic development in the state, and to a degree it would promote work-force development, since we would be training our students to work in this rapidly growing industry,” Seemann said.
The building would not support biomedical research. Instead, the research would focus on, for example, molecular tools to support horticulture, or development of vaccines to prevent disease in certain fisheries, Seemann said.
Seemann does, however, see the opportunity for the center to support the state’s existing and future biotech-manufacturing companies, which use large-scale facilities to develop therapeutics based on living cells.
URI recently approved a bachelor of science in biotech manufacturing, which will prepare students for careers at companies like Amgen Inc., which is in the process of investing roughly $1 billion in two massive manufacturing facilities in West Greenwich. Seemann called the industry “the new manufacturing for the 21st century.”
The program’s classes would be based at a future training lab on URI’s Providence campus. The Human Resources Investment Council has pledged $100,000 toward the lab.
“(The program) could be vitally important in helping attract the biotech-manufacturing industry to Rhode Island,” Seemann said. “We would be providing the work force as well as research products to advance the biotech manufacturing they do.”
The center, Seemann said, would complement another initiative backed by the
governor: a $10 million biopharmaceutical training facility, which also would
train workers for manufacturing jobs in the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors.
Carcieri has proposed $300,000 to begin conceptual design of that facility,
though neither a location nor a timeframe for construction has been announced.
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