ETSU upgrading Valleybrook facility with $5 million investment from the state
The campus includes 144 acres, a 72,000-square-foot research and office complex with 29 labs, and 30,000 square feet of warehouse.
In 2010, Eastman Chemical Company donated its Valleybrook lab facility between Kingsport and Johnson City along I-26 to East Tennessee State University (ETSU).
Now, thanks to a state investment of $5 million announced in Governor Bill Lee’s State of the State address and approved by the General Assembly this year, the facility is being upgraded with additional capabilities into a multidisciplinary hub combining public health, biology, and biomanufacturing innovation.
The goal is to develop a biomanufacturing ecosystem and grow a hub of synthetic biotechnology, building capabilities and capacity to serve a national network of pilot-scale and intermediate-scale facilities.
We recently toured the upgraded facility during a daylong trip organized by the Sync Space Entrepreneur Center. During that tour, we met Dave Clark, Vice President of Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development at the ETSU Research Corporation. He is a well-known and respected developer in the region.
The Valleybrook campus includes 144 acres, a 72,000-square-foot research and office complex with 29 labs, and 30,000 square feet of warehouse.
According to Clark, the site will be developed to serve four core functions that collectively will catalyze the biomanufacturing capabilities of the region and also advance national interests. They are:
- Workforce development;
- Joint ventures;
- Innovation incubators; and
- Asset rental.
The Valleybrook site and equipment will be available for education, research, private companies, and start-ups to decrease the barrier to entry.
Along with the ETSU Innovation Lab that is housed in a former National Guard armory, there will be much more wet lab space that exists in Northeast Tennessee than any other city in the Volunteer State.
A little over two years ago, Eric Jorgenson joined the ETSU Research Corporation as Vice President for Biomanufacturing Development. As noted in this January 2024 article in teknovation.biz, Jorgenson says he has two priorities. One part is developing educational programs for the workforce needed for biomanufacturing; the other is on ensuring the nation has an adequate supply of scale up facilities, built around opportunities that are offered in Northeast Tennessee.
Today, most every high school in the First Congressional District has a synthetic biology curriculum developed at MIT.
Those efforts were accelerated in September 2023 with announcement (see teknovation.biz article here) of a $1.3 million grant to ETSU from BioMADE, a national institute with a mission of helping secure America’s future through bioindustrial manufacturing innovation, education, and collaboration. The grant reaches $3.4 million when including costs shared by ETSU and its partners.
Then, in December 2024, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded the ETSU Research Corporation more than $900,000 as part of the Defense Industrial Base Consortium, an investment that will help create new opportunities to foster regional innovation in sustainable industrial manufacturing in the region. The goal is to support a bioindustrial scale up facility at Valleybrook.
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