"The real mission is to have a place where companies can come, the entrepreneurs can learn and then grow and build a local network of biotech companies.
"We could potentially be a poster child or one of the poster childs for graduates from The Bioscience Center.
Bioscience is a growing industry in New Mexico, with its own state authority and targeted state support. A 10-year-old incubator in Albuquerque provides lab space to help young companies find connections and grow.
Stuart Rose bought the building that would become The Bioscience Center in 2012 for around $1.5 million. After some renovations, the Center, located at 5901 Indian School Road NE, officially opened in January 2013.
"Our mission here is to grow local companies," Rose told Business First. "In a perfect world we'd make a little profit, but the real mission is to have a place where entrepreneurs can learn and grow and build a local network of biotech companies."
Alongside offices and meeting rooms, the nearly 20,000-square-foot Bioscience Center comes with various lab spaces that companies can lease on a per-square-foot basis. It meets what Rose described as a growing demand for lab space.
Rose, who also helped found the FatPipe co-working spaces in 2014, said the Center's labswere at full capacity by August of 2013, less than a year after it opened.
"The labs have not had a day since then when they have not been rented," he said. "There's huge demand for labs everywhere."
But the mission isn't to keep the startups at the Center forever. Rather, because there's always a demand for the space, Rose's goal is to see companies come in, use the space as they grow and then "graduate" to their own facilities.
One of those graduate companies was Green Theme Technologies, a Rio Rancho-based textile manufacturing company that started in The Bioscience Center but left in 2014. Besides its headquarters in the Albuquerque suburb, it also runs a textile finishing plant in Taiwan and it had one of the state's largest funding rounds last year.
Another is BioFlyte, a bioaerosol surveillance company that's currently in the process of moving out of the Center and into a larger manufacturing facility in Albuquerque. Its senior vice president of engineering, Steve Strohl, was at The Bioscience Center when Business First visited Feb. 23.
Click through the gallery at the top of the page to "meet" some of the people who help run the Center, and those who use it for their own startups and research.
"Now, we're really starting to ramp up," Strohl said. "We're growing the company and manufacturing, and we've outgrown the space [in The Bioscience Center]."
Strohl co-founded the company alongside Charles Call, BioFlyte's chief technology officer. The company, which has used space at The Bioscience Center for about 10 years, is currently doing product development and eyeing commercial customers, Strohl said.
"We could potentially be a poster child or one of the poster [children] for graduates from [The Bioscience Center]," he added.
Currently, the Center has about 20 resident companies, according to its website. Those companies, which include Circular Genomics, Armonica Technologies Inc. and TS-Nano, represent what Rose sees as a distinct aspect of New Mexico's business culture.
"What's unique about New Mexico, that I don't see other places, is that we have technology capabilities and capacities that don't exist many other places," he said.
While Rose said the state might not be successful in "attracting large companies to put their corporate headquarters and their [research and development] centers here," he compared New Mexico to a sort of bioscience and tech startup factory.
"We've created an environment where you keep manufacturing companies, because the technology continues to spew out of the labs and the universities," he said. "Instead of manufacturing widgets, we can manufacture companies."
Rose hopes The Bioscience Center can continue to help "manufacture" those tech-focused bioscience startups into the future.
