Biotech firm AGTC expands

KRISTINE ORREGO/Alachua County Today

L-R: Dirk Hunt, Technology Transfer Manager and Nitin Garg, Assistant Director, Upstream.

ALACHUA – A new 42,500 sq ft building for the biotech company Applied Genetic Technologies (AGTC) is in its final stages of completion.

Located in Foundations Park across the street from Progress Corporate Park on U.S. Highway 441, it is the first building for the company to merge its administrative offices with its labs under the same roof.

According to Chief Financial Officer Larry Bullock, the company was previously located in Progress Park.

He said their employees were scattered in four different buildings, including the EmiLiv Building, UF’s Center of Excellence for Regenerative Health Biotechnology (CERHB), RTI Surgical and the BDI Building.

He also said the new building is ideal for their ongoing growth, which is projected to increase over the next few years.

“Now we’re all under one roof, which makes it much more convenient for all of us to communicate,” Bullock said. “We’re currently at around 50 employees. Over the next few years, we anticipate that will grow to probably close to 75. We’ve expanded pretty significantly our lab facilities, so those are the sorts of things that we will continue to expand.”

Construction has been ongoing on the new building – situated alongside U.S. 441 heading into Alachua – since the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Foundation Park was held in May. The AGTC building is the first of several slated for construction in the park.

“The advantage of moving over to Foundation Park is that we are all centralized [now],” said Idania Sanchez, executive assistant to Sue Washer, the president and CEO of AGTC. “We’re all together – the offices, plus the labs.”

Sanchez also said AGTC, the only current tenant of the building, might lease out some space for another company.

“We’re hoping that we can lease other companies as well, but we’re really going very quickly, so we might take some additional space,” she said.

AGTC has ongoing programs to research, combat and focus on developing groundbreaking healthcare solutions to patients with rare diseases, according to their website.

Bullock said some of this ongoing research includes the development of gene therapy products. Their main area of interest currently is ocular diseases.

“We’re looking at genetic causes of blindness or genetic causes of severe visual impairments,” he said.

AGTC will host an open house at the new facility at 14193 N.W. 119th Terrace in Alachua at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 18.

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