Bioscience

Albuquerque boasts a seasoned biotech-biomed cluster of more than 100 companies that produce everything from surgical supplies to painless glucose monitors for diabetics.

Major commercial players here are Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon Endosurgery, which manufactures instruments in a 230,000-square-foot plant, and Cardinal Health, which acquired homegrown SP Pharmaceuticals in 2001. Most of the city’s biotech-biomed companies are small but diverse and many are spinoffs from Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico.

Activities are concentrated in these areas:

• Manufacture of instruments, devices, and supplies
• Research and development of medical equipment
• Bioinformatics
• Diagnostics

What Bioscience Companies Say

Egon Landgraf, CEO of Heel Inc., world’s largest producer of homeopathic products: “Heel Inc. has strong roots in Albuquerque for over 25 years and has made a conscious decision to expand and grow the business further in Albuquerque rather than relocate our manufacturing facilities and headquarters elsewhere.”

Ries Robinson, CEO of InLight Solutions: “We were able to recruit very good people and provide them with a good standard of living. In terms of research and development, Albuquerque’s a good place.”

Workforce Training

Central New Mexico Community College offers a biotech program with a two-year associate’s degree developed by an advisory group that included private industry and labs. And in 2004 the University of California chose CNM to develop a program in biophotonics (the use of light to understand living cells and tissues).

Bioscience Assets

Sandia National Laboratories has been deeply involved in the biosciences and is now in the forefront of bio-terrorism defense.

The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center includes a medical school, colleges of nursing and pharmacy, four hospitals and the Cancer Research and Treatment Center. The Health Sciences Center can gather data and understand impacts with relative ease because it has a repository of data on entire populations of patients and access to high-performance parallel computing. See http://hsc.unm.edu/. The Center for Biomedical Engineering is involved in creating materials, devices and knowledge to advance health care and biomedicine. See http://www4.unm.edu/cbme/ .

Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute is the nation’s only private, basic science, biomedical research organization dedicated to respiratory disease research. It makes facilities available to private industry.

Contacts

New Mexico Biotechnology and Biomedical Association