As part of StateImpact NH's weekly “Getting By, Getting Ahead” series, Amanda Loder is travelling across New Hampshire, gathering personal stories from the people behind the economy. In part three, we visit a biotech start-up in the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee region. You can find all series stories on the StateImpact NH website.
Deep inside a nondescript business park in Lebanon, a blocky, industrial building is getting a facelift. The inside has already been revamped, with big, glass-walled hallways and bright orange accent walls. Every so often, the staccato of hammers, whirring of drills and hiss of nail guns disrupt the quiet. But those are just the sounds you want to hear when you’re running a young business you want to grow. And that’s just what’s happening at the drug discovery company Adimab in Lebanon. “We haven’t seen any slowdown tied to the current recession,” says co-founder and CEO Tillman Gerngross. In some ways, Gerngross is the father of the Upper Valley’s biotech community. Originally from Austria, Gerngross came here in the late 1990s to be a professor of bioengineering at Dartmouth College. Adimab is the second venture he’s spun out from his Dartmouth research. The pharmaceutical giant Merck bought his first company for $400 million... Read more