A Montgomery County biotech just left Montgomery County. But it didn’t go too far.
Zalgen Labs LLC, an 8-year-old diagnostics company developing tests for “neglected infectious diseases” like Ebola and Zika virus, has relocated its headquarters from Germantown to Frederick — a move that co-founder and Managing Director Luis Branco said was more than a year in the making.
“We found that Frederick County was aggressively pursuing the recruitment of biotech companies to the county and specifically to Frederick City,” Branco told us. “Zalgen wanted to move further north from its Germantown location all along given that some employees had long and arduous drives from points north.”
The new office at 7495 New Horizon Way off of Route 355 “provides balanced access for all current employees,” he said, noting that the eight-person company plans to beef up its headcount now that it has the space to accommodate a larger team.
“It has been hard to hire qualified individuals during the pandemic,” Branco added. “We need to settle in the new space, then will restart our search.”
The Frederick location also allows Zalgen to do custom buildout. The company left 2,200 square feet at the Germantown Innovation Center for, now, about 6,500 square feet of lab and office. And after launching in 2013 at the Germantown site, “it was time to ‘graduate’ and establish operations outside the incubator environment,” Branco said. “Although our overall costs have increased due to significantly larger space, the price per [square foot] decreased and allowed us to consolidate the operations in a single suite.”
Zalgen had worked with Rockville’s Scheer Partners on the move.
The relocation, which occurred Dec. 1, doesn't include financial incentives, but Zalgen did secure “expedient approvals of permits,” and the process involved “significant interaction between the landlord and Frederick County government toward delivering the space on time,” Branco said.
Zalgen leaves Montgomery County at a time when the pandemic has only supercharged the county's I-270 biotech corridor, boosting funding and support for research, development and manufacturing. The Montgomery County Economic Development Corp. declined to comment for this story.
In Frederick, Zalgen said it joins nearly 80 other bioscience companies, along with the nearby Maryland Technology Council. There, the company will focus on its immunotherapeutic work, while another office in Colorado handles development of its diagnostics. The company is also hiring at that office to increase manufacturing capacity for its testing platforms.
Zalgen is now supplying antibody testing kits to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a foundation that invests in vaccine development for emerging infectious diseases, including Covid-19, to run a study in West Africa. There, Lassa fever — an infection that can lead to hemorrhaging, respiratory distress, vomiting and shock — is already endemic and could become an epidemic disease.
CEPI garnered attention in 2020 when it committed up to $400 million to Gaithersburg’s Novavax Inc. (NASDAQ: NVAX) for its Covid-19 vaccine program. The global partnership, founded in Davos, Switzerland, is funded by public and private entities to develop vaccines for infectious diseases.
Apart from the latest agreement, Zalgen already supplies its diagnostics and reagents to vaccine developers that CEPI funds. The local company separately supplies Covid-19 diagnostics for research to its customers, but the business opted to stay out of the commercial testing arena during this coronavirus crisis.
Heading into 2022, Zalgen will look to expand its work with CEPI to support pandemic preparedness efforts, Branco said. The company also plans to seek funding to advance its flagship immunotherapeutic candidate for Lassa fever to clinical trials, while expanding its portfolio to include agents for other infectious diseases.
