Category: Business/Technology

This eight-part series concludes appropriately with the biggest idea of all eight opportunities: to advance the region as a knowledge and convening center connecting, translating and integrating ideas to help regional and state businesses advance and compete globally. If you are thinking that this is already happening, you are right. The big idea here is to recognize this knowledge and convening role as an export product in itself and to take it to the next level. We are recognized around the world as an R&D center led not only by UW-Madison and WARF, but also by the expanded UW System that includes the two-year campuses and the county-based UW Extension, our outstanding technical colleges and private colleges, and many leading private sector technology businesses.

Itâ??s been 25 years since the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center started on campus, and to commemorate the occasion, a celebration is set for 2 p.m. Wednesday in the Biotechnology Center at 425 Henry Mall.

Dick Burgess, founding director of the center, said there were only three companies working in biotech in Madison in 1985.

“Now we have over 150 biotech firms in the area, and the state is recognized as a premier site for biotechnology research and industry,” Burgess said in a release from the UW-Madison news service.

But before it began operations, Mentor Worldwide LLC decided to abandon the Madison lab, which is valued at $16 million. The company announced Wednesday that they would donate it to the Morgridge Institute, a private research partner with UW-Madison.

The rush to find new drugs to fight cancer is spurring big growth for a Madison company. Founded in 1998 as Tetrionics, the company was purchased in 2004 by a division of Sigma-Aldrich, of St. Louis. Its main product at the Madison building is still the vitamin D compound discovered by UW-Madison professor Hector DeLuca that forms the basis of Zemplar, by Abbott Laboratories.

While much focus in town has been on filling vacant land at Hilldale Mall or the squabble over the downtown Edgewater Hotel, a big development is coming to the far west side that has sort of floated under the radar — the addition of a second University Research Park, or, as its backers call it, “URP2.”

I talked with Mark Bugher, research park director, who says they will break ground on a undetermined date this spring and that he foresees the first occupant there late in 2011 or early 2012. After city approval last fall, Bugher says the project has been moving along and it was decided to name new streets within the park after the five UW faculty members who won Nobel Prizes while at the university.

With demand outpacing supply, local food producers need to shore up delivery systems to get their goods to customers, according to a study out Thursday from UW-Madison and the UW-Extension.

“Scaling Up: Meeting the Demand for Local Food” takes a look at 11 enterprises and organizations trying to fill the middle level distribution role, which has suffered a setback in recent years when established distributors went out of business.

Madison-based Cellular Dynamics International has raised $40.6 million, according to a filing the company made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The privately held company, known as CDI, sells stem cell-derived heart cells to Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche and others to help them test the toxicity of drugs. CDI was founded by stem cell pioneer James Thomson and several other University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, along with some people previously associated with NimbleGen Systems LLC.

Pleasant View Road is little more than a dirt path in places right now. Drive west on Mineral Point Road past Target and it is easy to miss the beginning of Pleasant Viewâ??s southern extension, which will connect it to Valley View Road and the cityâ??s burgeoning southwest side.

But stand at the intersection of Pleasant View and Mineral Point at 5 p.m. on any weeknight and look east toward Madison, and itâ??s easy to see why Pleasant View may become one of the most important new roads in the city.

….The majority remains farmland, waiting for the recently approved University Research Park II to be built as one of the cityâ??s largest new economic development projects.

The University of Wisconsin and UW-Milwaukee announced a joint grant program this week that would create collaborative research initiatives between the two universities.