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Bioscience will need manufacturing work force
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Daniel Dechert, president and CEO of NanoScreen LLC of North Charleston, considers his company a “toolbox” for other players in the industry.
“We develop the automation that other biotech and large pharmaceutical companies use every day,” he said. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of NanoScreen’s best customers.
Three-year-old NanoScreen is also a company evolving from a research and development business to one that will soon be doing almost all of its manufacturing in house.
“At this point, its not that the local work force isn’t capable, it’s just that we have such unique requirements that we do have to look outside the state to recruit people we need. It’s a byproduct of our engineering tasks being so specific.”
“But its not like we’re professional recruiters. Now, once we’re in our new building, we will be doing manufacturing and have requirements we never had before.”
“I think our recruiting days are ahead of us; It’s almost like we’re at the edge of a growth spurt.”
Steven Kimmel is manager of international sales for Varian Medical Systems/Interay, the nation’s largest independent manufacturer of medical X-ray tubes. Here in the Lowcountry, the company operates a plant that loads its bulbs into other manufacturers’ housing.
“As far as our manufacturing work force is concerned, we were able to train local people in cooperation with Trident Tech and that provided us with a pretty good pool of labor.,” Kimmel said. “Another thing that proved fortunate for us being here in the Lowcountry was actually the closure of the Naval yard in the early 1990s. As a result of that, we were able to pick up some people who had very specific radiological skills.”
Though Kimmel embraces the rush toward bioscience, he said his feeling is that in the long run the Charleston region will be a manufacturing center of bioscience products rather than an intellectual center.
“I also kind of see the region as becoming something of a specialty medical service provider and medical device manufacturing center,” he said.
“I’m crystal balling it here, but as that manufacturing occurs, a sizable work force will develop that will find it easier to transfer between industries than they do right now. The port has a lot to do with that too because many of its activities support manufacturing. And then you’ve got Hildebrand here, a big hospital manufacturer … so it’s going to be interesting to see how the region’s push into the biosciences really pans out.”
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