Charlotte may promote itself as biotech hub

CHARLOTTE -- Now thought of as Banktown, Charlotte could soon start marketing itself as a hub of medical manufacturing companies and others connected to the life sciences.

The Charlotte Chamber says there are hundreds of unheralded companies in the area that turn scientific research into real products, such as artificial limbs and sterilization equipment. Many have sprung from the region's old-line manufacturing past.

Marketing the Charlotte area as a successful home to specialized manufacturing would be a high-tech addition to an image once defined by textiles and more recently by the rise of big industries such as banking and motorsports.

That news could be used as potent advertising to lure fresh investment to the 16-county region and build on the momentum of the $1.5 billion North Carolina Research Campus under construction in Kannapolis, said Erin Watkins, research director for the chamber.

To try and prove its point, the chamber won a $50,000 grant in June from the state-funded N.C. Biotechnology Center to research and define the area's biotech companies and their numbers. An initial study last year surprised Charlotte boosters because it suggested more than 500 companies connected to the life sciences were operating in the region. The chamber sought the grant to take a closer look at the operations, some mom-and-pop outfits largely unnoticed by the broader business community.

It would be one of several sectors that have existing clusters of businesses in the region that economic developers see as strengths, such as banking, defense, motorsports and energy companies, among others.

To be sure, the Charlotte region isn't and probably won't ever be a biotech hub on the order of Boston, San Diego, San Francisco or Raleigh. Those areas are famous for their multi-billion dollar research and drug-manufacturing economies based on international drug conglomerates and major universities, such as MIT and Harvard.

But Charlotte-area boosters believe they can carve a national reputation as a place where biotech research is spun into final products and services, such as retail DNA tests that can prove paternity or making the most high-tech artificial limbs, among others, said Tony Crumbley, vice president of research for the chamber.

"Raleigh thinks they have the only life sciences cluster in the state because they focus on research companies," said Crumbley, who noted the Triangle's three major universities, medical community and Research Triangle Park. "But what Charlotte has been good at is the application of biotech research."

The chamber has already identified nearly a hundred companies that manufacture and sell medical and dental devices.

"That's a serious number when you get up to that level," said J. Mac Holladay, chief executive of Market Street Services, an Atlanta-based economic development consulting firm working on the Kannapolis project, a 300-acre research campus being built on the site of a former sheet and towel maker that closed its doors five years ago. "It's a good idea for them to look at the companies so they know what to build on."

Holladay said it's natural for local recruiters to want to diversify Charlotte's image away from banking, a long-standing desire intensified by recent trouble in the sector that's threatening the local economy, he said.

The chamber's preliminary list includes Advanced Bionics in Charlotte, which makes and markets hearing aid implants, and SynerMed in Kannapolis, which provides financial services for healthcare companies. It includes the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has a seed-testing laboratory in Gastonia.