Biotech company grows on former steel mill site

OraSure is preparing to expand into a new 50,000-square-foot laboratory and manufacturing facility.
BETHLEHEM, Pa. (AP) -- Entrepreneurs are watching their newly approved rapid-results HIV test turn into rapid growth for their company springing up on the site of a long-shuttered steel mill.
OraSure has doubled its employment this year, to 200, and is expanding into a new building with a view of rusting Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces.
"It's giving back to the community by creating jobs on the abandoned steel mill site," said Michael J. Gausling, president and chief executive officer.
OraSure is the latest success story for Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania, the state-sponsored technology incubator at Lehigh University launched to try to replace lost steel industry jobs. Chief Executive Officer R. Chadwick Paul Jr. said the group has helped start companies credited with creating 8,000 technology jobs in northeastern Pennsylvania in the last 20 years.
"OraSure has been one of the greatest success stories," said Tony Hanna, Bethlehem's director of community and economic development. "It's certainly poetic and fitting to have the new technology develop in the shadow of the old mill."
Company history
Gausling and R. Sam Niedbala, executive vice president and chief science officer, started the company using borrowed beakers, thermometers and other lab equipment. Its first product was a sunscreen towelette.
First named SolarCare, the company signed a license agreement with Coppertone in 1991 to market SunSense towelettes worldwide. By 1993 the company had changed its name to STC Technologies and was marketing Histofreezer portable cryosurgical systems to doctors.
The medical focus prevailed. STC Technologies increasingly concentrated on diagnostic tests that life insurance companies, clinical laboratories, doctors' offices and workplaces could use to check for infectious diseases or drug abuse.
In September 2000, STC Technologies merged with a Beaverton, Ore., company called Epitope, which had been marketing medical tests under the OraSure name, to form the present company in Bethlehem.
The company moved from the incubator site -- a former Bethlehem Steel research laboratory -- to a technical center Ben Franklin Technology Partners built with local governments and economic development agencies to house companies in post-incubator stages.
Now OraSure is preparing to expand into a new 50,000-square-foot laboratory and manufacturing facility next door on the site of the long-idled Bethlehem Steel mill along the Lehigh River.
FDA approval
OraSure announced Nov. 7 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved its OraQuick rapid HIV test. Clinic operators say the test is a huge improvement over current methods that require people to wait several days to find out if they've been exposed to the virus that causes AIDS.
"Some people don't come back for the regular test results, anywhere from 40 to 50 percent, depending on the neighborhood," said Dr. Beny J. Primm, executive director of the Addiction Research and Treatment Corp., in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Abbott Laboratories will distribute the OraQuick test, focusing on hospitals and doctor's-office laboratories.
Meanwhile, the company is also spreading the word to doctors, clinics and military installations in remote areas.
Officials at the privately held company wouldn't project OraQuick sales or potential jobs at the Bethlehem site, but said the prospects are great.