Page 29 - Westchester County Economic Development Guide 2013

Biotech
According to Dr. Barry Kappel, Vice
President of Business Development for
Yonkers-based ContraFect Corporation,
a biotechnology cluster directly benefits
from Westchester’s fertile commercial
setting. “When you have bodies such as
the NY BioHud Valley initiative, member
companies benefit from mass support
provided by government programs,” he
explains. “That’s a clear advantage over
having to seek them out on their own.”
On behalf of dozens of life science
companies, NY BioHud Valley has been
facilitating partnerships with county, state
and federal government since 2010 to help
expand these businesses and attract new
ones.
The region is driven to be the “East
Coast Silicon Valley,” and ContraFect is one
of the key components. The four-year-old
company develops novel approaches to treat
infectious diseases, “particularly those that
are resistant to current therapies,” Kappel
explains. “We use biological approaches
rather than small molecule antibiotics
such as penicillin and oxacillan. By doing
so, we have been able to use naturally
made enzymes that have the ability to kill
extremely potent bacteria. These can be
increasingly dangerous as their resistance to
current treatments rises. What we are doing
is a completely different paradigm shift.”
At Regeneron Pharmaceuticals,
a leading research and development
company dedicated to discovering new
pharmaceuticals, a majority of the
company’s 1,800 employees work at the
corporate headquarters in Tarrytown.
Echoing what other biotech businesses have
observed, Peter Dworkin, Vice President
of Regeneron’s Investor Relations and
Communications, says a prime Westchester
advantage for high-tech companies is that
the concentration of firms doing similar
work creates a large pool of potential
staff. These are people who know and
appreciate that if they choose to change
jobs within their fields, they’ll likely find
a new position without having to leave the
community.
“Another plus is that spouses of staff
members, particularly those with bio/
medical research or similar backgrounds,
are also likely to find satisfactory
employment in this area,” Dworkin
notes, pointing to similar scenarios in
Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Mass. and
Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
Throughout these areas, a vast corps of
skilled professionals – such as attorneys
specializing in intellectual property rights
Dr. Barry Kappel, ContraFect Corporation
Photo by Bill Milne
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