Just rewards: Fitzsimons company gets $80,000 loan from Aurora to keep fledgling bioscience firm from flying the coop

AURORA | A company at the Fitzsimons Life Science District developing new vaccine technologies isn’t leaving Aurora anytime soon.
City officials and Greffex Inc. have worked out a deal to keep the company at Fitzsimons for at least five years.
Greffex CEO John Price said under the deal, the city is loaning Greffex $80,000 to cover some of the cost of the company moving into a new facility in the new wing of the Fitzsimons Bioscience Park. After five years, the loan will be forgiven, Price said.
The cost of the new project is into the seven figures, Price said, so the city’s contribution is only a “small fraction” of the overall project.
Price said city officials and the Aurora Economic Development Council made it clear to the company that they wanted Greffex to stay in Aurora and be part of the burgeoning bioscience scene near the Anschutz Medical Campus.
“Aurora has decided that it is going to be the biotech center. They are going to change the paradigm,” he said.
Wendy Mitchell, CEO of AEDC, said keeping the company in Aurora was a priority because bioscience companies like Greffex are always at risk of being poached by another city.
“It’s very important for us to really spend a lot of energy to make sure they stay,” she said. “They are not huge right now, but they are going to be.”
In fact, company officials said this month that they had a offer from the city of Louisville to relocate to that northern Colorado locale.
“Everybody laid out the red carpet for us,” Price said. “We could have been somewhere else.”
The company is developing several products, including a new influenza vaccine that could reduce the time it takes to develop a vaccine by about 75 percent.
Price said that with the company’s GreVac vaccine project — which develops vaccines at a cellular level — they can roll out 100 million doses in five weeks, and they don’t need 100 million eggs the way current methods do. Instead, the company could produce that many vaccines in a small area, using machines that take up about as much space as three standard washing machines, Price said.
The influenza vaccine market alone is worth about $5 billion each year, Price said, and Greffex is working to develop several other vaccines.
A swine flu vaccine is headed to the FDA for approval after successful tests in animals, an avian flu vaccine is being tested in animals and an anthrax vaccine that was effective in animals is undergoing more testing, Price said.
The 12-year-old company is also working on gene therapy and technologies to help transplant patients keep from rejecting new organs.
Mitchell said it was crucial to keep Greffex in Aurora because of the company’s potential.
“I believe that this company is going to hit it big,” she said.
Reach reporter Brandon Johansson at 720-449-9040 or bjohansson@aurorasentinel.com