The 13-year-old Virginia Biotechnology Research Park is reaching "critical mass" and is poised for take-off, president Robert Skunda told the Virginia Venture Forum earlier today. While the biotech complex has attracted its share of American businesses and institutions, it may be foreign companies that take it to the next level.

The biotech park has made impressive achievements in its brief history, especially considering that Richmond has never been considered a major star in the biotech galaxy. Within the park, there are 44 private companies, four Virginia Commonwealth University research institutes, four state labs and five not-for-profit organizations – and that doesn’t include VCU’s medical campus next door where tens of millions of dollars of medical research takes place each year.

The biotech park, which now has nine buildings and 1.1 million square feet of commercial space, has incubated 63 companies (19 from VCU), of which 31 have "graduated." Three have become publicly traded companies. Companies at the park are attracting more early-stage and venture investment capital than ever before.

Now, said Skunda, the park is putting into place a new capability that will launch it to even greater heights: the Virginia BioSciences Commercialization Center. This center, run by Donna Edmonds, herself a successful entrepreneur in a past life, will help small companies with a promising product create the relationships, achieve the regulatory approvals, set up the distribution channels and perhaps even raise the capital they need to commercialize their inventions.

The Commercialization Center has established strong connections to incubators and venture firms in Israel, a country that has emerged in recent years as a hotbed of innovation in the pharmaceutical and medical-device fields. Because Israel is so small those companies have no choice but to establish a presence in the U.S. marketplace, which accounts for more than half the spending on biotech and biomedical products globally. Edmonds' goal is to persuade them to set up shop in Richmond.

Israeli companies are tremendously inventive but, for the most part, they have no idea of how to penetrate the American market, Edmonds said. To help them through the commercialization process, the biotech park has set up an advisory board of biomedical scientists and executives who cover a wide range of disciplines. Richmond has two tremendous underutilized assets, she said: an unusually strong physician community that conducts clinical trials outside the usual academic setting, and two of the nation’s largest distributors of medical devices: Owens & Minor and McKesson. Meanwhile, the commercialization center has approached Richmond’s Jewish community with the goal of raising roughly $4 million for a venture fund to help finance the Israeli companies.

Although the Israel initiative is in the early phases, it is showing great promise. Nine companies have signed on as tenants of the biotech park. Although the presence is largely nominal right now, the companies have promised to set up their U.S. headquarters in Richmond when the commercialization push takes off. If this development model succeeds, Skunda said – and he knows of nowhere else in the United States where it exists – the Israel initiative could serve as the template for recruiting early-stage biotech and biomedical companies from other countries that want to establish a foothold in the U.S.