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Pharmaceutical equipment company to break ground on new facility
By Bob Bouyea
Executive Editor
Daniel Dechert completed a two-year experiment: Could he run his pharmaceutical equipment company from Charleston?
The experiment was a success, and now Dechert’s company, NanoScreen LLC, is set to break ground on the first phase of its new headquarters in the Charleston Regional Business Park Center. A groundbreaking ceremony was set for Nov. 23 at 11 a.m.
“We wanted to see if it was feasible to stay in Charleston,” said Dechert, the company’s president and CEO who brought the company here from Los Angeles in August 2003. “Shipping from here has been great. It’s very nice to bring clients to Charleston, and it’s easy to recruit people here.”
NanoScreen provides equipment for liquid handling from the consumable plastic tubes that hold the liquid to the robotic arms that move the samples between two places to the syringe heads that can handle up to 1,536 samples at one time.
The first phase of construction will allow the company to move from its 8,000-square-foot facility, located at 499-A Jessen Lane off Clements Ferry Road, into a two-story, 25,000-square-foot building in the same area.
The building will house a clean room, a shipping and receiving department, and a machine shop on the first level. The second level will have offices, the electronic assembly area, where the robotics are assembled and tested, and a full wet lab where pharmaceutical companies run their testing processes on site.
This expansion will allow the company to move the manufacturing of its consumable plastic parts, which are still handled in Los Angeles, to Charleston. The company currently employs 25 and expects to have 75 employees in the next two years.
Within the next two years, construction of phase two, a 20,000-square-foot, single-story addition, should be underway, Dechert said.
NanoScreen serves major pharmaceutical companies, such as Eli Lily, Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Glaxo Smith Kline and others, with pipette tips and automated dispensing systems used in drug discovery and other early-stage research.
Bob Bouyea is the executive editor for the Business Journal. E-mail him at bbouyea@charlestonbusiness.com.
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