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An ongoing effort to develop a domestic pharmaceutical supply chain in metro Richmond earned a special designation in October as an advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing tech hub, which comes with access to millions of federal dollars for its work.
The hub designation from the U.S. Economic Development Administration covers the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area, a large portion of Central Virginia. The consortium, led by the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Marketing in Prince George County, is one of 31 national tech hubs created under the federal CHIPS and Science Act. Each hub is now eligible to apply for $40 million to $70 million in federal funding.
According to Joy Polefrone, executive director of the Alliance for Building Better Medicine, a program formed by Richmond-based Activation Capital to unite the alliance’s 15 member organizations in the public and private sectors, the alliance’s goal is to address critical medicine shortages and build a resilient national drug supply by developing active pharmaceutical ingredients — “that’s the part that works in your Tylenol,” she explains as an example — in the Richmond and Petersburg areas along Interstate 95.
The tech hub designation builds on several other recent fundraising successes, including a $52.9 million grant secured last year under the EDA’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge that was “specifically advocated for” by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. An advocate of the project since he was on Richmond’s City Council, Kaine says he “pushed to make this competitive tech hub designation possible.”
“I think it’s pretty incredible [that] there's this group of people who are trying to build better medicine — and that means affordable and accessible and here [locally],” Polefrone says, ”so that if we do have supply chain challenges, we have the capacity to have access to the things that we need in our backyard. And that for me is pretty cool.”
