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By Staff • Norhtern Colorado Business Report • May 12, 2010
FORT COLLINS - University and government officials came together to celebrate the public unveiling of Colorado State University's Research Innovation Center.
The 72,000-square-foot facility on the Foothills Campus will serve university researchers as well as private companies in the biomedical field. It features state-of-the-art bioscience laboratories as well as office space, a portion of which will be set aside as a business incubator for lease by CSU startups and existing businesses.
The hope is to extend CSU's infectious disease supercluster by partnering the public and private sector scientists and embedding business development teams with the researchers. The goal, CSU President Tony Frank explained, is to shorten the time from laboratory to market for the groundbreaking research and discoveries being made at the university. Frank added that he expects this facility to be the first of several for CSU, with other research centers dedicated to the other superclusters in clean energy and cancer.
The $53 million RIC facility, funded through university-issued bonds, broke ground in 2008 as an addition to the existing Infectious Disease Research Center. The center also houses the 38,000-square-foot Rocky Mountain Regional Biocontainment Laboratory. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory can be seen from the panoramic windows in RIC's roundtable meeting room.
Gov. Bill Ritter attended the ceremony and was on hand to help cut the ribbon marking the facility's opening.
"I'm very proud of this university for the foresight they've demonstrated with the focus on this 21st-century industry," he said.
The event also marked a changing of the guard. Outgoing Infectious Disease Research Center Director Ralph Smith, who will retire at the end of May after 27 years at CSU, hosted tours of the new facility. Incoming Director Rick Lyons discussed the reasons behind his decision to leave a 16-year career at the University of New Mexico's New Mexico Health Sciences Center to join CSU.
"The talk of integrating business with academia - you hear that a lot as you travel around the country ... and it's a lot of talk," he said, adding that he sees CSU actually walking the walk, as the RIC demonstrates. |
