Biotech sector growing, AGTC occupies new building at Foundation Park

Special to Alachua County Today

Applied Genetic Technologies (AGTC) moved into its new combined corporate office and laboratory facility in Foundation Park located on U.S. Highway 441 in Alachua. The company previously occupied several buildings in Progress Corporate Park.

ALACHUA – Over 50 people attended the open house for the new building in Foundations Park housing biotech company AGTC.

Some of the notable faces at the event included Alachua Mayor Gib Coerper, Vice Mayor Ben Boukari Jr. and Assistant City Manager Adam Boukari.

Sue Washer, the President and CEO of AGTC, took the stage to express her gratitude to those in the community who helped make the new building a reality, including the construction company that worked swiftly to bring it to completion.

“We’re very happy to be in the building and also for the super hard work from everybody from Concept Companies,” she said. “They built this building to our specifications … It was just an amazing feat to get this all together.

“I just wanted to shout out to some many people in the community that helped make this happen,” she continued. “Phil Hawley – he was really the person that stepped up and said, ‘Hey, there’s a local company that needs more space. We want that company to stay here in this community,’ and he worked really hard with the University of Florida.”

The open house allowed guests the opportunity to tour the labs and ask questions about the cutting-edge gene therapy research the company is involved in.

Current research at AGTC is concentrated on the treatment of rare eye diseases. One such disease is called achromatopsia, an inherited condition that causes impaired vision, light sensitivity and color-blindness, according to the website for the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus.

The disease currently only affects about 10,000 people in the U.S., according to AGTC Vice President and CMO Dr. Jeffrey Chulay.

“The types of diseases we’re dealing with -- is even with the best corrective lenses and glasses, these people still can’t see normally,” he explained.

Chulay said AGTC is involved in creating a functional copy of a gene to replace a gene that is mutated or abnormal in patients. “The function of genes is to provide the instructions to a cell to make a protein,” he said. “If the gene is mutated, or abnormal, then the instructions are wrong, and the cell will either make an abnormal protein, or it will not make any protein at all.”

AGTC also studies animals that have the same gene inconsistencies. One video featured on the company website shows a dog afflicted with achromatopsia running into walls while trying to navigate a maze. The video later shows the same dog, treated with gene therapy, making its way through the maze with ease.

“In some of the animal models that we’ve looked at, where we have mutation in the same gene in the animal that we have in people, we’ve been able to show that we can restore and improve the vision in the animals,” he said. “And that’s what we’re trying to do with people.”

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