Innovation and Discovery at the Phoenix Biomedical Campus – Downtown Phoenix AZ

Downtown Phoenix is evolving, that much is true.

The way David Krietor sees it, the area will transform into a fundamentally more connected, yet a more global community as time goes on.

Krietor isn’t referring to one tall building or residential development being the catalyst for growth in the community. Instead, the area will roughly follow the model of what is called an “innovation district.” Such a place blends residential housing, with existing nearby universities to accommodate and house private industry and entrepreneurs.

“It’s gonna be much more dense, much more connected to a large group of new employers. The whole vibrancy of the whole area will continue to improve,” Krietor said.

Some things will remain constant, like the nearby art scenes on Roosevelt Row, but the makeup will shift into a place where artisans, residents, professionals, students and entrepreneurs in the medical community occupy the same dense area.

This isn’t conjecture on his part but more of an accepted understanding of developing local trends unfolding over several decades.

Krietor is the executive director of the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, a collection of Arizona’s three major universities – Arizona State University (ASU) – University of Arizona (UArizona) and Northern Arizona University (NAU) – three of the five major hospital systems, and a mixture of public and private research all clustered under the same umbrella of real estate between Roosevelt Row and Downtown.

Downtown Phoenix has seen explosive growth in the last decade, progress marked by outstretched cranes, construction, new cultural items, mainstays and generally, areas that are more walkable. More than a decade of investment by public universities and private residential developments has made the paradigm shift possible.

But to new visitors and residents to the area, this density only occurred in the last decade or so – it wasn’t always like this.

The Past

The City of Phoenix had a 28-acre sized problem.

They owned an undeveloped stretch of land, roughly bordering Fourth Street to Seventh Street from west to east, and Garfield Street to Monroe Street from north to south, that was just sitting there.

The rough boundaries of the eventual Phoenix Biomedical Campus, as seen in aerial views from 2001. (Courtesy of the City of Phoenix)

Two things landed them in this position: the PBC site was once planned as a site to expand the convention center, envisioned as a separate expo center, while the Arizona Cardinals passed on the northern portion of the land as they shopped for a stadium location before their move to Glendale. Phoenix Community Alliance and the Downtown Phoenix Partnership initially acquired the land options and then assigned them to the city after the deal fell through.

But eventually both of those ideas were eventually scuttled when something better came along.

In the not-to-distant past, Phoenix was the only major city in the U.S. without a four-year medical school. For local medical students trying to earn the equivalent of that education, the solution was patchwork. A couple hundred ASU medical students traveled to and from Phoenix from the main campus, while UArizona students didn’t even study Downtown. The research community was established but similarly scattered in the wind.

At the city level, they noted this absence where in Philadelphia, a city of comparable size, had a handful of them throughout.

“Something’s wrong here, we had a shortage of physicians,” Rick Naimark, then Deputy City Manager, said. “We had residencies [in Phoenix] because a ton of University of Arizona students came up and did rotations because there weren’t enough hospitals and opportunities in Tucson.”

An illustrated overlay of the finished buildings on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, with 850 PBC representing the last constructed structure, finished in 2021. (Photo Courtesy of Wexford Science + Technology)

Culturally, there was somewhat of a deficit too. Art communities on Roosevelt Row, the Warehouse District and elsewhere sprouted up in the early 1980s. New skyscrapers went up to position the city for the future. At the start of the new millennium, the city had a convention center, baseball field and arena but a noticeable absence of people during times without conventions or sporting events.

There was no reason to stay downtown after hours to play.

Yet, there were shifts in the makeup of the city that worked in favor for a biomedical campus. First, the advocacy for a local light rail public transportation line, which was a stretch of track connecting Phoenix to Mesa. At first, a controversial topic, the train harnessed the power to connect far-flung cities in the Metropolitan Phoenix area and bring further economic investment to a depressed area.

And lastly, in the mid-2000s, the universities made a foothold Downtown, with ASU placing its journalism, nursing and several other programs in the heart of the city. There would be a support system for the fledging biomedical campus.

No single person can be credited with creating the emerging educational infrastructure, as it exists now. Naimark says this can be broadly attributed a series of these independent, yet converging elements serving the end transformation of the Downtown core.

“There was a lot of community consensus that drove a lot of this stuff,” Naimark said.

The first rumblings of what would become the PBC began with the announcement of Downtown Phoenix as the headquarters of Translational Genomics Research Institute, or TGen, in 2002. The city pledged funds that eventually built the research group’s permanent physical site, designed by the Phoenix office of SmithGroup, at Fifth and Van Buren streets, across from the Arizona Center.

The headquarters of TGen, as it appeared in 2009. President Jeff Trent is a University of Arizona graduate and was the former scientific director of the National Human Genome Research Institute before returning to the state. (Courtesy of the Downtown Phoenix Archives.)

Over the next twenty years of its existence, TGen’s economic model to incubate startups (more than 30 companies at last count), sell them and reinvest with an interest in the companies, which would prove to be somewhat prophetic with the model innovated at the Wexford Science + Technology building on the eventual campus.

At the time, building such infrastructure, where little to none preexisted, carried with it a sense of skepticism to outside observers that such development takes years to cement. For instance, the headline of a contemporary New York Times article lead with it being an “ambitious, if risky, strategy.” When TGen opened their headquarters in spring 2005, Phoenix wasn’t even ranked on an Ernst & Young list of states with thriving biotechnology markets.

“It was part of an effort to create a sense of life, activity and engagement in Downtown as opposed to folks who were visiting and driving back to their suburban location, which was typical of the labor force,” Krietor said.

A few years into the repositioning, the city had already raised $100 million in a mixture of public and private funding, including from the Flinn Foundation.

The initial class of University of Arizona’s College of Medicine-Phoenix students were taught in the historic Phoenix Union High School buildings, as their own Health Sciences Building was built, starting in 2010. (Photo by Bill Timmerman)

Eventually, a coalition developed between the city, the Board of Regents and the universities to expand medical education and research to the area, with the board bringing UArizona’s medical school to Downtown as the first major step.

In December 2004, the City Council formally adopted a decade-long roadmap of the vision of Phoenix, the first of many deliberate actions to spur economic development.

An inaugural class of 24 UArizona medical students arrived to study in the historic former Phoenix Union High School buildings in 2007, located between Seventh and Van Buren streets, and left four years later as doctors. A decade later that overall number of total medical students grew to 346.

In fall 2010, UArizona’s College of Medicine, the first campus anchor, broke ground on the Health Sciences Education Building, a massive 264,000-square-foot facility.

The eventual Health Sciences Building, designed by CO Architects, completed in 2012. (Photo by Bill Timmerman)

Every few years another pivotal partner was brought into the fold: In 2015, Banner Health partnered with UArizona UArizona to create a 30-year academic affiliation agreement with the colleges of medicine in both Tucson and Phoenix, an investment worth $1.2 billion for the two cities. In subsequent years, whatever remaining health science gaps were filled with the arrivals of other institutions and educational systems, like Creighton University, the Department of Veteran Affairs.

A literal health science desert transformed into an oasis.

But, believe it or not Phoenix Biomedical Campus still hasn’t closed out on its masterplan.

The Present

The current stage of development and focus is reflected by 850 PBC, a flexible space for research, office space and retail alike, designed by HKS Architects. For its research function, the building comes equipped with wet and dry lab space.

The city subleased a portion of the land that eventually became 850 PBC to Wexford Science and Technology, a Maryland-based real estate company that focuses on developing universities, academic medical centers and research institutions.

Within the building, Wexford is positioning itself for the next generation of private companies, who come to them directly and incubate within an ecosystem of labs, for the small and scrappy startups not at the stage of ten millions of dollar of funding and leased lab space.

Opened in March 2021, the 227,000-square-foot 850 PBC building, located between Garfield and Fifth streets, acts as the first structure under the five-building masterplan.

After the initial opening last spring, 35,000 sq ft of lab space called the “Wexford Innovation Labs” that quickly became 60% preleased within a few months. ASU also leases half of 850 PBC.

Wexford Science and Technology has embraced the community element of their front patio design by HKS Architects, with coffee carts and live acts playing at First Fridays being example of the community activation. (Photos by Danny Upshaw)

Wexford sits on the northern end of where pedestrians converge on Roosevelt Row for First Fridays, where they often host coffee and live music on their front patio, and where residential developments have slowly filled in the privately-owned land over the last decade.

One might assume that situating research facilities so close to culture might be a detriment to the science. In fact, the people at Wexford, at every turn, conveyed the opposite.

“When we were working with Wexford at the very beginning that was one of the things they really wanted was to be close to the arts district because there’s a lot of great synergy that happens between the creative minds and the sciences,” Claudia Whitehead, the Bioscience Healthcare Program Manager at the City of Phoenix, said. “They’re very cognizant to partner with the community and let people in[side].”

In the present day, empty city lots represent placeholders for the buildings soon to be under construction under the Biomedical Campus masterplan. A tall Clayco crane from a nearby construction site points south to where the four remaining lots left to be developed under that vision, and where the remaining university research buildings will be erected in the pockets from the first wave of construction. This process will occur over the next 15 years, according to Whitehead.

However, while still in the present researchers and bioscience technology soldier on, potentially creating all sorts of potential paradigm shifts.

The Future

Perhaps the most exciting development to come out of the PBC recently is the arrival of OncoMyx, a company, which true to its name, is developing an immunotherapy modified from an oncolytic virus that stimulates the immune system to target cancers.

The ocolytic virus, Myxoma, is a type of virus found in specific breeds of rabbit throughout the world. When researchers introduced it into laboratory animals infected with cancerous cells, it killed these growths. Moreover, the virus was found to be unharmful to humans and animals because it could not adapt through millions of years of evolution.

With local roots at ASU, Mayo Clinic and SkySong, which elevated them beyond the academic setting, the innovation immunotherapy attracted $25M private funding, including from GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s largest pharmaceuticals.

The first stage of funding dictated where they should focus what cancerous formations the oncolytic virus should attack, in this case gastrointestinal, blood cancers and tumors, while a second round of $50M of private funding is going toward human-trials by 2023, a goal they’re currently on track to meet, according to Dr. Steve Potts, the CEO and Co-Founder of OncoMyx.

“One thing we ask ourselves in the pre-clinical stage is, ‘What cancers can we go after? Should we think about lung cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, blood cancers?” Potts explained. “And that is an important question because if you pick a cancer that doesn’t have a lot of responses it hinders your work. So you try your best to look at the experiment and that’s tricky in immunotherapy because the immune system is so complex.”

As soon as 850 PBC was open for business, OncoMyx became one of the first tenants in the building. A handful of local and remote employees have the mobility to travel from airport to boardroom in about 10 minutes, working in a state-of-the-art biological lab with active collaboration with key local partners, all while operating under a modest footprint.

“What we’re definitely showing is that you can build a world-class biotech company outside the three big hubs and be successful,” Potts said.

The seven private companies in the 850 PBC – four of which are spinoffs from either ASU or UArizona – are companies on the cutting edge of tomorrow’s research and therapies.  A company called ElectraTect developing tools to measure marijuana consumption, while Calviri is a cancer vaccine company using errors in the body’s own immune response to respond to cancer. BacVax, a company incubated at the nearby College of Medicine, develops vaccines against bacterial infections in the building.

850 PBC has made local engagement with the arts a centerpiece of their community outreach. For instance, the mural in the lobby was created by local muralist Kayla Newnam. (Photo by Taylor Costello)

There’s a name for this type of industry and it’s called “translational research,” where the end result of innovation is therapies, pharmaceuticals or devices that can operate in the real world. However, as logical as that seems as an end goal, Krietor says that was never an explicitly-stated intent.

“The PBC was never envisioned as a place where these companies would aggregate and grow. Five years from now, there will be 20 to 30 companies – some of them fairly significant,” Krietor said. “And it’s gonna create a very high end employment base for downtown that we’ve never really had in the sciences, like in other areas.”

But that innovation is already paying dividends in the way of a steadily growing employment base which is estimated to bring in $3.1 billion in revenue for the state by 2025. A city that once ranked nowhere on a list of thriving bioscience markets is now ranked #5 in emerging life sciences markets and ranked #1 for life science jobs.

Phoenix was late to the table in gaining a robust biomedical community, but ironically enough, it’s better positioned than similar cities it once trailed.

“If you go around the nation and look at the other bioscience parks like this, some of them are still struggling to get housing, the arts, or hotels around them. And we have all of that already,” Naimark said. “We had all these great assets and now we’re building the jobs, the research and the higher education.”

Not bad for what was once a big dirt lot.