Ignite Institute to Build 300,000 Square Foot Headquarters in Fairfax County
Fairfax County will soon be the home of a new personalized medicine research institute that promises to create four to five hundred jobs over the next six years and usher in a new era of medicine designed to help alleviate the health care crisis.
By Avery Fellow | February 23, 2010
Fairfax County will soon be the home of a new personalized medicine research institute that promises to create four to five hundred jobs over the next six years and usher in a new era of medicine designed to help alleviate the healthcare crisis.
The Ignite Institute for Individualized Health, headed by renowned geneticist Dietrich Stephan, Ph.D., is slated to break ground for its 300,000-square foot headquarters in early 2010.
"We’re facing a significant healthcare crisis in the next 20 years from chronic disease," says Institute CEO Stephan, listing diabetes, cancers and Alzheimer’s as major drains on the country’s health. According to Stephan, the United States spends 17 percent of its GDP on healthcare, a number expected to balloon to 40 percent by 2030, "which is totally unsustainable," Stephan says. Stephan credits the crisis to longer life expectancy coupled with burgeoning populations. The Institute is looking to genetic research to solve the crisis.
"We aim to tease out what the true underpinnings of these diseases are and address them in a personalized and proactive way for individuals," Stephan says, "as opposed to the current method of reactive and generalized treatment of chronic disease."
"By sifting through an individual’s genetic code," Stephan explains, "a doctor can discover inherited genetic risk factors and encourage patients to either avoid specific environmental exposures that might trigger those diseases or sign up for screening earlier than they would have otherwise."
Stephan and his team plan to deliver the results of their research to people in the national capital region through a partnership with the Inova Health System. Doctors at Inova health care centers will be able to utilize a pre-symptomatic risk assessment, developed by Stephan and his team, to give patients information about their genetic predispositions. "Then, the institute can measure how much it reduces the disease burden in the D.C. area and move the program out nationally," Stephan says.
"We’re talking about truly changing the way we deliver medicine," Stephan says, citing the need to be close to the Food and Drug Administration as the institute develops new tests and new drugs that will need federal approval. In addition, Stephan says the introduction of broad-based genetic screening for diseases will bring up privacy and discrimination issues, "We wanted to be close to policy makers so no one gets potentially hurt by this new era of medicine," Stephan says.
Gerald Gordon, Ph.D., president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, worked with Stephan and Fairfax County to help locate a site for the institute. "People working in this field tend to be young, so access to Inova health care system, the metro, and visibility in the community were important," Gordon says.
The institute itself will employ Ph.D.s and M.D.s as well as graduate students, but Stephan expects to attract entrepreneurs and businesspeople to fill the new biotech bubble, and Gordon says pharmaceutical and biotech companies will also move in.
Though Gordon says a lot of the talent pool is already in the area, the venture itself is entirely new. "For us in northern Virginia, it’s a new industry segment. It’s the crossroads of bioscience, biomedical research, the data acquired from clinical trials in hospitals, and the application of technology to generate results in areas like genomic research and proteomic research," Gordon says.
Gordon and the FCEDA also helped Stephan secure funding for the institute, the largest component of which is $150 million in industrial revenue bonds issued by the FCEDA, which allows the institute to get a commercial loan and sell bonds at a lower rate, Gordon says.
Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine granted the Ignite Institute $3 million out of the Governor’s Opportunity Fund, which the Ignite Institute can use to build wet laboratory space at the Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon, which Stephan’s team is using as an interim workspace. The team should be receiving the state funds within the next week, Gordon says.
Stephan says they have raised more than half the money they need for the first five years of operating the center, and he is actively working on raising the second half right now. "We feel like we have enough to start operations and move forward," Stephan says.
The D.C. area institute follows a pattern established at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, where Stephan served as deputy director of discovery research. The Phoenix institute opened in 2004 and created 220 jobs within two years, as well as brought $21.7 million to the local economy. According to Gordon, who researched the Phoenix center before bringing it to Fairfax, TGEN prompted the creation of 14 new companies in the Phoenix area within six years.
"This is something that will change the nature of this economy," Gordon says. It also has the ability to extend Fairfax County’s reach around the world. The kinds of things these institutes do are really earth-shattering."
Stephan also sees a significant economic opportunity for the D.C. metro region. "We’re really excited to be in the area. We hope that we can leverage the expertise in the area in IT and in business to create a new economy here." Stephan and his team will make a final decision on the center location in the next few weeks. Gordon expects the announcement no later than mid-December. Stephan says he hopes to break ground in Fairfax County and start scientific operations in early 2010.
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