MTSU Presence Boosts Rutherford’s Tech Ambitions
Published Jul 22, 2008
Kristie E. Womble, innovative projects coordinator for BioVentures Inc., works at the company’s lab in Murfreesboro.
“Navigating Genetic Diversity” is the slogan for Murfreesboro-based BioVentures Inc., and since 1988, the privately held company has discovered and produced breakthrough bioscience products used by researchers around the globe.
Pointing to BioVentures’ two decades of success, Rutherford County hopes to navigate its economic development efforts toward technology-related enterprises, including the biosciences.
“Research in the medical field is becoming much more of a prominent industry,” says Holly Weber, vice president of economic development for the Rutherford County Chamber of Commerce. “With Destination Rutherford, diversification is extremely important when it comes to our job base and economic base locally.”
Destination Rutherford is the chamber’s quality job growth initiative, focusing on the creation of professional opportunities in the marketplace.
A feather in Rutherford County’s cap is the 23,000-student Middle Tennessee State University. Nearly 5,300 MTSU students are majoring in a science, says Thomas Cheatham, dean of the College of Basic and Applied Sciences.
“We are quite diverse,” Cheatham says of the college. “We have 10 departments, and we range from agriculture to physics and astronomy.”
Other majors include chemistry, mathematics, aerospace, nursing, computer science, military science and engineering technology, which boasts the nationally recognized concrete industry management and construction management programs.
The Tennessee General Assembly has been asked to consider a proposal for a new science building, projected to cost more than $115 million, that would aid in recruiting top students and faculty.
That’s good news for BioVentures, which puts MTSU interns to work each summer. The company also funds scholarships for chemistry and biology students, says Elliott Dawson, BioVentures founder and president.
The company was launched based on a patent application for a rapid immunoassay to detect the AIDS virus. “It was going to take an immense amount of money to develop and commercialize that, and so we were able to identify a niche in the nucleic acid area related to genetic testing and forensics and have been able to pursue that quite successfully,” Dawson says.
Over the life of the company, BioVentures has earned $40 million in wholesale sales.
The company makes fully packaged, individual, marketable units of its products and also sells its products in bulk to other companies that handle their own packaging and labeling.
“We also sell to our base of customers, who are researchers, and we sell through a distributor network in Europe, the Middle East and Asia,” Dawson says.
Sales have started on a new line of instruments produced in Germany that make use of BioVentures-developed technologies.
BioVentures would be successful anywhere, but Dawson says he never considered moving the company out of Rutherford County. “It’s a good place to live, with a slower pace and less intensity than Nashville.”
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
Photo by Jeff Adkins
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