One high-profile tenant, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, expanded its operations to a site in Cheshire, a suburb of New Haven, while another company, Gene Logic, left the Park and moved to Gaithersburg, Maryland. The main threat was the lack of laboratory space in the city. There had been talk in the 1990s about developing a biotech park in the Hill district near Yale-New Haven Hospital. But toward the end of the last decade when the OCR had companies ready to roll, the proposed site was still a weedy median strip along Route 34. The former headquarters of the Southern New England Telephone Company at 300 George Street was empty, and Alexander saw beyond the peeling paint.
Startups like to be close to the source of their science.
RCA, as it is known, enables researchers to detect small molecular abnormalities in genes and proteins that are important in many diseases. It has set a gold standard for detection tests called immunoassays, and it was of almost immediate interest to a number of industries. Christensen was eyeing lab space in New Jersey. So was William Rice, a cancer researcher and entrepreneur with a fledgling company, Achillion Pharmaceuticals , that needed a product to commercialize. And it almost didn't happen in New Haven, for Achillion was being heavily courted by Princeton, which offered first-rate facilities.