Jefferson County residents have reason to celebrate. As recently reported in the Commercial, Vivione Biosciences LLC, a Little Rock-based manufacturer of a new high performance diagnostic system targeting health and food safety issues, has moved to the Pine Bluff Arsenal.
The announcement was made Tuesday, and local officials hope the move will be the start of a biotechnology trend in Jefferson County.
The Jefferson County Economic Development Corp. provided the firm the first incentives from the three-eighths cent sales tax for economic development approved by voters in 2011. The company will receive $73,000 to locate at the lab at the Army installation.
To even begin to understand what Vivione Biosciences does takes a bit of concentration. The company’s flagship product, a system of integrated technology marketed as RAPID-B, represents a new era of quick testing for harmful bacteria. The technology is suitable for use in a number of areas.
According to the company website, the RAPID-B system is appropriate for “Clinical and Medical Fields, Food and Industrial Safety, Water Safety and Bio-Defense.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
As it further states, the advantage in the company’s products derives from the unified set of detection technologies, “by utilizing one compact, universal platform for all diagnostic testing that can be used for bacteria, viruses and toxins.”
Where traditional culture techniques can often take several days to provide results, Vivione’s technology can detect E. coli and salmonella, for instance, in a few hours. In our ever-hastening world, the benefit of this improved delivery time is self-evident.
The advantage that the company’s presence portends for this region of the state is the fomentation of a biotechnology corridor. That will bring high-paying jobs and all the collateral benefits of an improved middle-class economic base.
Moreover, Vivione’s move to the Arsenal holds the seeds of a plan we should adopt as a means to attract other businesses to our area. Even so, such attraction often requires substantial outside-the-box thinking on the part of local governments and business leaders.
Kudos to the economic development corporation for securing Vivione’s commitment to set up shop at the Arsenal. As George Makris, chairman of the corporation, said, the hope is that this move, which could turn into 300 addition jobs in a few years, will become an “anchor project” for other bio-tech companies locating in the area.
Certainly, many of the “tools” are in place for the creation and expansion of such a high-tech corridor. A Vivione executive said the company collaborated with the National Center for Toxicological Research, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the University of Arkansas’ Center for Food Safety in Fayetteville as it researched this new technology. Those entities, as well as the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, provide strong magnets to bring such firms to our area.
To create such an attractive environment for science, technology and clean industry we must embark on a multi-pronged approach. Tax incentives are certainly part of the mix, but so too are important attractors like good schools (workers have to be well-educated); good housing stock (workers have to want to live here); safe streets and clean neighborhoods (workers want to feel secure and welcome).
In short, we need a unified front in order to capitalize on the promising model set by Vivione. In the meantime, we welcome Vivione and hope its investment in us will be money well-spent.