Millyard rising: Biotech effort selected as ‘Tech Hub’

‘ReGen Valley’ will be able to compete for a share of $500 million in federal funds

Forget ManchVegas. The smart money is betting Manchester will become known as “ReGen Valley,” the global leader for biotech manufacturing.

The effort led by the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute was named a Tech Hub on Oct. 23 by the Biden-Harris Administration, one of 31 programs in the country singled out for economic development by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

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The program is primed to accelerate the effort launched six years ago by inventor Dean Kamen to make the Manchester Millyard and Southern New Hampshire a global headquarters for the production of human cells, tissues and organs.

ReGen Valley will be able to compete for additional federal funding from $500 million secured for the program. Six years ago, ARMI was launched with $80 million in funding from the Department of Defense and has been gathering additional funding. Last year, the project secured $44 million from the Economic Development Administration as part of the Build Back Better Regional Challenge.

“The point is, people stopped rolling their eyes that this is some kind of dream and started focusing on how we are going to make it a reality,” Kamen said in a meeting room at 500 Commercial St. the day the destination was announced.

“And the feds are helping, the state’s helping, the locals are helping. We have 190 some odd companies and universities that are helping. We are developing virtually all the critical resources you need — from scratch — to create a whole new industry.”

Kamen and other local leaders associated with the ARMI project, as well as Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig and Nashua Mayor Jim Donchess, gathered at one of ARMI’s Millyard offices for a Zoom press meeting with President Joe Biden, who briefly addressed representatives of the regional hubs.

“The 31 Tech Hubs stretched across the entire country will be able to compete for up to $75 million each to accelerate and scale up their work,” Biden said.

He alluded to the economic displacement many once flourishing manufacturing communities suffered as companies moved operations to Asia and other developing nations, something Manchester experienced in the ’70s and ’80s, decades after the Millard’s heyday had come and gone.

“We’re creating good jobs in communities all across the country, including places where for decades factories have been shut down and hollowed out as jobs moves overseas to find cheaper employment,” Biden said. “Over the past few decades these communities have lost more than jobs. They’ve lost their sense of dignity, of opportunity, their sense of pride.”

The Tech Hubs program was authorized in the CHIPS and Science Act, which Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan helped negotiate. Shaheen, D-NH, secured $500 million for the program in the 2023 government funding law, her office noted in a news release.

The 31 Tech Hubs were selected from 370 applications from regional partnerships that include industry, academia, state and local governments, economic development organizations, and labor and workforce partners.

“A designation as a Tech Hub really is recognition of what we’ve been working on for the past six years, and it will bring with it the possibility of additional funding to promote those initiatives,” said Maureen Toohey, deputy executive director of ARMI and general counsel of Kamen’s DEKA Research and Development Corp. “We’re one of the 31 areas around the country that has the chance of becoming the hub of a global industry within the next 10 years.”

Back when Kamen started buying up empty Millyard space in the early 1980s, local officials balked when he said he wanted to add air conditioners for the research and development engineers he planned to house in the buildings.

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Manchester leaders had a hard time envisioning the former global textile powerhouse as anything but a manufacturing center.

“I remember back in the ‘80s when there was a tree growing out of a mill building,” said Craig, a native of Manchester. “Thanks to the vision of Dean Kamen investing in Manchester, we are now revolutionizing health care as we know it in these mill buildings.”

ARMI’s reach from the Millyard will extend to Nashua.

“We’re very excited to be joining in this initiative. Great vision,” Donchess said. “The potential for wonderful economic growth, jobs and just a transformative industry.”

Four decades after Kamen started buying up Millyard property, the Millyard is on a path toward eclipsing its textile industry past with a manufacturing prowess based on cutting-edge medical technology. Kamen said he wishes ARMI would have accomplished in six months what’s taken six years thus far. But he’s long used to that kind of schedule.

“Every major project I’ve ever started in my life I would assume would take a few months since it’s obviously so important,” Kamen said. “And every overnight success I’ve ever had took between 10 and 20 years. I think this is the birth of an entire industry.”

Kamen compares the burgeoning biotech industry to the rise of semiconductors — only bigger.

“We digitized, we changed the world,” Kamen said. “This will be an industry bigger than — and frankly to your health more important than, and to our economy more critical to the world as a new industry — than Silicon Valley, which is why we are calling it ReGen Valley.”

The goal is to completely revolutionize health care. And if it sounds far fetched, so once did holding a pocket-sized computer in the palm of your hand that connects you to the entire world via satellites orbing the Earth.

“We’re going to create all the functions that you need so that whether you need a kidney, a liver, a lung, a heart, skin, bone — whatever you need — the old model of chronically treat you and hope to keep you from degenerating will turn into, ‘Oh, you need one of those. We’ll schedule you for an appointment,’” Kamen said.

“You’ll come in like you take your car when the generator needs to be fixed, or a starter motor. You don’t throw away the car, you go and change the part. … Chronic treatments don’t restore what you had, they just help you deal with what’s missing. It’s expensive. And nobody would prefer that to a cure.”

What has thus far stalled the production of human body parts and tissue are methods to replicate it on a large scale.

“What this ReGen Valley is going to do is set the stage for the scientists who have the possibility to deliver the science. We will turn it into a scalable, deliverable, cost-effective solution to cure most of the chronic diseases that people are worried about, and that are basically bankrupting our medical systems,” Kamen said.

Biotech workforce rising

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New Hampshire’s life sciences workforce grew more than 15 percent between 2012 and 2021, adding about 1,500 jobs and accounting for nearly 4 percent of the state’s total job growth, according to a study released by the state Department of Business and Economic Affairs.

The state’s life sciences industry reported $4.3 billion in sales in 2021 and had 11,290 employees who earn average salaries of $130,848 per year, according the study, conducted by Camoin Associates of Saratoga Springs, New York, as NH Business Review reported in June.

Andrea Hecahvarria, president and CEO of the NH Life Sciences, a newly formed trade association, sees the work at ARMI evolving into a catalyst for the state’s biotech industry and a corridor that stretches to Cambridge, Mass.

“I don’t know how many people in New Hampshire are truly realizing what is being built there and the breath of a new industry and how if all goes as planned, you’re really thinking about a different way of talking about health care and talking about disease and how we treat it and potentially how we cure it,” Hecahvarria said in a recent interview.

Jennifer MacDonald, a medical doctor and Army veteran who served as senior adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs during her six-year stint with the agency, joined ARMI as chief operating officer in January.

“Building a coalition around this specific vision, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted as a family doc, as a veteran,” McDonald said. “This is going to matter to service members. This is going to matter to veterans. This will be restorative for so many veterans, like the ones I had the opportunity to serve in D.C. And this is going to matter truly to all of us, for generations of us.”

Julie Lenzer, who joined ARMI in 2022 as chief innovation officer, will serve as regional innovation officer for the Tech Hub.

“We’re really excited because we’re building on what (the Department of Defense) had invested in,” Lenzer said Monday. “So a really strong foundation in ARMI with manufacturing, regulatory, and bringing the engineers and the scientists together.”

The $44 million grant the project secured last year from the Economic Development Administration gave organizers the go-ahead and the funding to work with the community toward creating a physical hub and support for businesses, she said.

“Now with this one, we envision we can start looking at affordable housing, child care — what are the other barriers that are keeping our workers from being able to access these jobs and education?” Lenzer said.

Kamen asked for “a call to action to the city, the state, the kids in this community, to get the right background, to go to one of these institutions to develop the skillsets to become part of this whole new industry. They’ll be great careers, not jobs, they’ll be careers.”

He’s hoping tax advantages for companies and employees that meet the standards of becoming part of ARMI, which include tuition forgiveness, will help New Hampshire attract the workforce it needs to be a serious contender.

“We need a lot of things because this industry is going to grow fast, and I want to make sure we stay in the lead,” Kamen said.

Strength in numbers

The ReGen Valley consortium designed a Tech Hub by the U.S. Department of Commerce includes:

• Dartmouth
• Manchester Community College
• Southern New Hampshire University
• University of Massachusetts Lowell
• University of New Hampshire
• City of Manchester
• City of Nashua
• New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs,
• ARMI (The Advanced Generative Manufacturing Institute)
• Advanced Solutions Life Sciences
• DEKA Research & Development Corp.
• Catholic Medical Center
• Merrimack Manufacturing
• New Hampshire Hospital Alliance
• Rockwell Automation, Safi Biotherapeutics
• Vitro Labs
• NextGen Manchester Resiliency Council
• Southern New Hampshire Planning Commission
• Business Finance Authority
• ‘New Hampshire AFL-CIO
• New Hampshire Building, Construction and Trades Council
• Manchester School District
• FIRST Robotics New Hampshire
• Business Association for People of Color
• Granite YMCA
• Amoskeag Ventures

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