Last week Governor Abigail Spanberger announced that RINGANA, an Austrian life-sciences company, chose Roanoke for its first U.S. headquarters: 435 jobs and $85 million, on a new campus on Frontage Road next to the Charles W. Day Technical Education Center, the city’s career-and-tech school. The City landed it with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership and the Roanoke Regional Partnership, and the Commonwealth added a $5 million grant.
That is the headline. The part we keep coming back to, from our spot at 315 Albemarle, is everything underneath it.
Roanoke can do almost the whole thing
It starts with the science. Tiny Cargo was one of the first companies to spin out of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. It works on milk-derived exosomes to deliver drugs, and its lead product protects cancer patients during radiation. Over the past few years it has grown into a real company and recently opened its own plant in Roanoke.
For the companies coming up behind it, the region just added an on-ramp: RoVa Labs, a $26 million, 40,000-square-foot wet-lab incubator downtown that opened only this spring, backed by Fralin, Virginia Tech, Carilion, the City, and the Commonwealth. A startup can do real lab work there without building a lab from scratch. Several are already in the pipeline: Acomhal Research, BEAM Diagnostics, and Qentoros are sharing cleanroom space at Fralin right now.
So the small end is covered. And with RINGANA, the big end is too. A foreign company looked at the whole country and decided to build here.
Where the VCCC fits
What is still thin is the middle. When a company outgrows the incubator but is not ready to build its own campus from the ground up, it needs existing space in the corridor: conditioned office and warehouse with real power, ready now instead of two years out. There is not much of that downtown.
That is what the Virginia Can Company Complex is. It is 46,000 square feet on a 2.44-acre assemblage, in the same downtown corridor as RoVa Labs, the Fralin institute, and the Carilion and Virginia Tech medical campus, the part of Roanoke that life-sciences companies are choosing. When the next Fralin spinoff outgrows the incubator, there are not many buildings nearby that can take it. We are one of them.
When you’re ready to see it in person, set up a walk-through.