MEDIA ADVISORY: Research Innovation Center with Biosciences Incubator Opens at CSU Foothills Campus

WHAT: Opening of the Research Innovation Center at Colorado State University’s Foothills Research Campus. This unique building features space for a biosciences incubator, health and disease research by CSU faculty and private business, and production space to move innovations into testing phases as quickly as possible.

WHEN and WHERE: Ribbon-cutting ceremony at 4 p.m. Tuesday, May 11, Colorado State University Foothills Campus. Tours available to media at 3 p.m. with an RVSP.

DETAILS: Colorado State University will unveil an innovative building designed to bring businesses, disease experts and other biomedical scientists together to optimize collective creativity and research around product development.

The 72,000-square-foot, $53 million Research Innovation Center is a hybrid of business office space, university research offices and state-of-the-art bioscience laboratories, conceptualized to build university partnerships with CSU startups and existing businesses. The facility will house efforts to develop, perfect, test and market test vaccines and treatments for a variety of diseases including cancer and those that infect and kill millions of people and animals around the world each year, such as West Nile virus, drug-resistant tuberculosis, yellow fever, dengue fever, hantavirus, plague and tularemia.

A significant part of the building will serve as a biosciences incubator, fostering startup companies that will help translate university research into new products that address unmet biomedical needs. The facility will be built to standards that allow scientists to produce products for human clinical studies, and partnerships with the medial industry, government agencies and other non-profits will be made through connections with MicroRx, a non-profit CSU enterprise. MicroRx, part of the university’s Supercluster strategy, works to move infectious disease fighting products to market as quickly as possible.

The Research Innovation Center is an addition to the existing Infectious Disease Research Center, which also houses the 38,000-square-foot Rocky Mountain Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, which was completed in October 2007 and began research in the spring of 2008. That building was constructed with a $30 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease.

Gov. Bill Ritter is scheduled to speak, along with CSU President Tony Frank, Bill Farland, vice president for Research and Rick Lyons, newly appointed director of the Infectious Disease Research Center.

RSVP: Reporters must RSVP by noon on Monday, May 10, to Dell Rae Moellenberg at (970) 491-6009 or DellRae.Moellenberg@colostate.edu.