Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Tuesday announced $66.7 million in grant funding for life sciences projects in the state, including a $15 million tranche for Activation Capital.
The Richmond organization, which bills itself as an innovation ecosystem development organization, operates the 34-acre VA Bio+Tech Park in downtown. It said it will use $10 million of the new funding, which comes from Virginia’s 2023 budget, to help create a 102,000-square-foot Innovation Center in the park to alleviate a strain on space there.
As Richmond Inno reported in January, the Innovation Center project will contain office and lab space and house startups. Activation Capital says it plans to break ground on the project later this year.
The other $5 million from the state will support the capacity to produce basic ingredients for medicine in the Richmond-Petersburg region, part of an effort to build itself as a hub for manufacturing essential medicines under the Alliance for Building Better Medicine. Activation Capital is also part of that effort. The alliance was awarded more than $52 million from the Biden administration last year to jump-start the effort.
Chandra Briggman, president and CEO of Activation Capital, said in a statement the new funding “is truly an investment in the commonwealth’s future.”
“With this new funding, the Central Virginia region will add critical infrastructure, deepen our specialization needed to be competitive in this sector, and fuel the next generation of innovation and economic development," she said.
Along with Activation Capital, other members of the Alliance for Building Better Medicine include Petersburg’s AMPAC Fine Chemicals, Utah nonprofit generic medicine provider Civica Inc. (which is building a plant in Petersburg), Richmond pharmaceutical company Phlow Corp., Henrico County’s Community College Workforce Alliance, the Greater Richmond Partnership, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the Medicines for All Institute at VCU, Virginia State University, Virginia’s Gateway Region and the cities of Richmond and Petersburg. The Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing, Walmart Inc. and U.S. Pharmacopeia have also joined the project.
In November, the alliance named Joy Marie Polefrone, previously the director of health innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University’s da Vinci Center, as its permanent director.
