The ribbon cutting was this morning at a University of Iowa laboratory that creates ingredients for research projects from medicine to ethanol. Gwen Jarosh is quality assurance manager of the lab known as C-G-M-P, short for Current Good Manufacturing Practices.
Jarosh says, "We help researchers and small start-up companies with fermentation and downstream processing to provide product for them to experiment with, provide it for tox studies." The staff of 30 at the C-G-M-P is part of another facility at the U-of-I that most folks have never heard of — the Center For Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing.
Jarosh says the lab is creating materials that are being used in a host of scientific tests in Iowa and around the globe. She says their clients "have an enzyme or a specific gene they want to have re-produced and we can do that in our fermenters and then purify it in the downstream facility. The products may be vaccines, may be pharmaceuticals, enzymes, intermediates. We provide that niche in between the research laboratory and a pilot plant."
Jarosh says the lab has industrial, governmental and academic customers within Iowa City and as far away as New Zealand, Germany, India and the U.K. She says, "We have done ethanol production. We have done enzymes. We have done antibiotics, but for G-M-P, and that is what our ribbon-cutting is for today, that primarily is focused for pharmaceuticals."
The expanded lab is at the Oakdale Research Park in Coralville. She says for more than 20 years, the facility has combined has helped to reshape and define new technologies for chemical, pharmaceutical, nutritional and agri-chemical industries.