The following is an extended version of the article that appears in our February 2023 Sourcebook issue.
Photo courtesy Joy Polefrone
Ongoing efforts to make metro Richmond a locus for the manufacturing of essential medicines got a $111 million boost in late 2022, thanks to the Alliance for Building Better Medicine. The funding, a combination of federal grants, state money and local donations, will benefit manufacturing plants in Petersburg and laboratories in Chesterfield County and Richmond and will enhance employment opportunities.
About three-quarters of drugs used in the United States are made overseas, mostly in China and India. The work in metro Richmond is part of a national effort to boost domestic pharmaceutical production.
An array of interests has aligned in the effort to bring drug manufacturing and research to the area, organized under the banner of the Alliance for Building Better Medicine. In November, the alliance named its first permanent CEO, Joy Marie Polefrone.
She is working with alliance affiliates that include Richmond-based Phlow Corp., which focuses on essential pharmaceuticals; the nonprofit Civica Inc., which will manufacture generic drugs in Petersburg; and AMPAC Fine Chemicals, which produces ingredients for pharmaceuticals at its plant in Petersburg. Other participants include the Medicines for All Institute at the Virginia Commonwealth University College of Engineering, the cities of Petersburg and Richmond, Walmart, United States Pharmacopeia, Greater Richmond Partnership, Activation Capital, The Community College Workforce Alliance, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, Virginia’s Gateway Region, and the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing.
The project also entails new laboratories in Chesterfield County and Richmond. Training for the jobs needed to perform the work will be provided through schools including Virginia State University and Virginia Commonwealth University.
The alliance has its origins in an effort to form a regional strategy that utilized existing assets to develop advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing. It received $52.9 million in federal money through a Build Back Better Regional Challenge in September 2022, one of 21 coalitions across the nation to receive money through the challenge. The project also earned $13.6 million from local organizations and $44.6 million from the commonwealth.
Polefrone succeeded the interim executive director, Jeff Gallagher. She is a Virginia Beach native and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at James Madison University and a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Virginia. She served as a director of health innovations for the Da Vinci Center at VCU and worked in entrepreneurship and health innovations for VCU Health and VCU. She also served as director for the Focused Ultrasound Foundation in Charlottesville and is a yoga enthusiast and certified yoga teacher.
We caught up with Polefrone for a discussion of her professional journey in chemistry, the intersection of leadership and yoga, and the challenges and expectations for the alliance and its work.
Richmond magazine: You assumed duties in mid-November 2022. How are you familiarizing yourself with the alliance and its stakeholders?
Joy Polefrone: I’m very new to the role, but I’ve been following the work of the alliance for the better part of a year, just really learning what it is. I’m trying to understand the industry, because it’s not my primary background; I’m a chemist by training, but I was a bioanalytical chemist. Relevant, but a different field. So, I’m interested in what happens in the body and how medicines connect to that, certainly. When I came on board there, the organization was at a critical time, and we had just won the funding to be able to start to do the work to build up the organization, and to establish what an alliance looks like and what a coalition in an industry space like advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing needs to be.
RM: What drew you to chemistry? Was it a practical reason, or more of a passion?
Polefrone: I was really interested in science from a young age, but I think it was more that I liked solving problems. … I was pre-med when I went to college, I started out as a biology major; I’d always wanted to be a pediatrician. And then when I was in my biology classes freshman year, I really didn’t enjoy them. It was a lot of memorization; it just didn’t resonate with me. And my chemistry classes were really hard, but I liked them. And I found myself working hard to understand chemistry, and to do well in it, and then being very successful and doing well. Then when I got into the laboratory setting, it was fun. I liked working with my hands, it was very methodical, and analytical chemistry in particular made so much sense to me; it was very structured.
RM: What type of development is planned for the laboratory spaces in Richmond and Chesterfield?
Polefrone: One is an innovation structure, and that’s in Richmond in VA Bio+Tech Park, to create space, the availability for research and innovation to be done. Ideally, startups working in those spaces are connected to Medicines for All. After early innovations and ideas come to be [in the Richmond facility], they have to scale up to be able to be manufactured at larger volumes or larger amounts, and the scale of development center is in Chesterfield County.
RM: This project requires a well-trained workforce. How are workers being prepared?
Polefrone: There’s quite a bit of activity in the workforce space. And that is really a collaboration between Virginia State University and VCU, as well as Brightpoint and Reynolds community colleges, in order to bring together the capability sets needed to create the workforce. There’s also an initiative with rural community colleges and local colleges that are in more rural areas to try to create a pipeline of capable and well-trained individuals who are interested in working in this industry to have an opportunity to build the career stages that they might need to be a technician and in advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing, which is a new certificate program.
RM: What else is in the works for the alliance?
Polefrone: We’re also working on developing a supply chain, imagining what the supply chain needs to look like for this industry to be successful in this region. And that’s a project that’s very much square in the work of my team.
RM: What’s the work of your team?
Polefrone: At this point, I’m the full-time employee, but then I have an individual who’s working on grants administration, and I’m in the process of looking for resources in the space of project and program management. So, when I think about where my focus is in the next year, it’s centered on operational execution. I love the early stage of a startup, and that’s really what we are. We’re establishing what our processes are going to be for how we’re going to build collaboration among all the different coalition members, what are the different ways we’re going to come together on a quarterly or biannual or annual basis in order to ensure that we’re fostering that element of collaboration and connectivity that we were created from.
RM: You’re a yoga instructor. Where's the intersection for you of yoga in your personal and professional lives? What impact does that have on how you live your life?
Polefrone: It’s at the center of my life. I think it sort of starts being raised in a Catholic family. And so religion was a very important part of my upbringing. But as I navigated my tweens and my teens, and my parents divorced during that period of time, I didn’t find something that felt like it connected to me at that energetic and spiritual level until I started practicing yoga. And when I started practicing it, it was like, "Oh, this feels like magic, and this feels like the way it felt to sing in a church full of people when I was a kid in Catholic school."
Yoga is not a religion, it’s very much a philosophy. What it teaches is to be kind and to be open. And those are at the core of being a good collaborator and a great leader. Certainly, if we were to read a book on servant leadership, it would probably mirror a lot of the principles that are inherent in the philosophy of yoga and teaching that, for me is really important.
When I’ve done leadership development with people, and been a coach of others, what I’ve noticed is that self-awareness and emotional intelligence are some of the most important characteristics to being or becoming a great leader of other people. And so I’ve not found a better tool than self-reflection or yoga or being in the woods, some of these things that are in the philosophy of yoga, for leadership development. My hope is that by role modeling some of these things that I learned, I might help us build an even greater coalition of leaders to solve this innovation ecosystem.
RM: How did you end up in Richmond?
Polefrone: I chose Richmond because of its proximity to family, and the fact that I was ready to put down roots, but I wasn’t sure what that would look like. And it seems like a good combination of all of the different cities I’ve lived in; the water running through the middle of the city, access to trails, close to the ocean and close to the mountains. And when I came to learn about the Da Vinci Center for Innovation, I was really excited. It was that intersection of, the business and the product management side of things, the science and the engineering, and the arts. And when I think about the best teams that I was on, they had that kind of combination of capability sets.
