Quoting from the article by Greg Avery on Steve VanNurden, recently appointed Pres/CEO of the Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority: "VanNurden’s hiring completes a shift making the FRA less of a real estate organization and one more focused on helping to attract and find resources for medical and technology businesses that want to be in the park.
'Rather than make this a real estate play, we’re going to make this a biosciences community,' he said. 'We have all the ingredients to be able to do that; we just need to put them in the right places.'. .
. . . . Near VanNurden’s office door, construction workers are finishing the interior of an $8 million expansion of the building that houses the FRA headquarters and 3½ floors of labs and offices for 38 bioscience startups, most of which come from the university labs across the street.
The expansion opens July 25, and it will be 90 percent occupied. Four companies — Isogenis, Inc., LightLabs, Mitomics and Touch of Life Technologies — are moving in. They outgrew their space in the bioscience incubator building, said Vicki Jenings, the FRA’s director of business relations.
VanNurden hopes the growth of companies incubated on the campus will drive demand for more buildings, and that some large companies result from the homegrown tenants.
He plans to look beyond the FRA’s immediate surroundings for tenant companies. He envisions the park one day attracting computer technology companies and clinical-trials management companies, not just strictly drug and medical-device research companies. . .
. . . On July 3, VanNurden realized a longtime industry contact had a layover at DIA. VanNurden — who declined to identify that person’s company, saying only that it’s well-known — picked up the person and his colleagues, and gave them an impromptu tour of Fitzsimons and information about the work being done on the campus before returning them to DIA.
'They didn’t know what this was, and they were very interested to discover what’s going on here,' he said."
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