"The Center for Global Health Innovation (CGHI) is thrilled to announce and welcome NexGen Biobanking to Georgia's fast-growing life science community," said Edie Stringfellow, Vice President of Ecosystem Development at the Center for Global Health Innovation. "NexGen's presence in Georgia will help our state become a leader in advancing precision medicine and empowering public and private research to progress more quickly."
Andrew Pazahanick, the Managing Partner of NexGen Biobanking, said, "We are excited about the opportunities for NexGen in the Atlanta area, Georgia, and the Southeast.”
Pazahanick continued, "Three years ago, John Norton and I started Select Gases, a specialty, medical and industrial gas company specializing in the sales and service of cold chain mechanical and cryogenic equipment. Because of our placement in this industry, servicing customers such as Emory University, Morehouse School of Medicine, The CDC, and others, and knowing that biobanking is a critical infrastructure for Georgia, we had the vision to create a biobank and are initially storing and managing over 3,000,000 biospecimens across 70 cryogenic freezers/containers in our Norcross facility.”
Pazahanick added that “when the Center for Global Health Innovation, based in Atlanta, began coordinating partnerships with the State of Georgia, Georgia Power, Atlanta Metro Chamber of Commerce, Partnership Gwinnett, Georgia Research Alliance, Georgia Board of Regents, the private sector, Transwestern, and many others to innovate scalable solutions for global healthcare, then John and I committed to starting NexGen Biobanking.”
Stringfellow went on to say, “Georgia is laying the foundation to improve global health, health technologies, and life sciences and biobanking services which are an essential component of any serious BioCluster. Georgia’s life sciences industry has experienced strong and steady growth in recent years, outpacing even the rapidly expanding national industry. To maintain this level of growth, Georgia desperately needed a leading biobanking company like NexGen.”
Stringfellow concluded that Georgia is perfectly positioned to host a premier biobanking company like NexGen. Atlanta is the shipping capital of the United States, which gives NexGen an edge in receiving or shipping biospecimens globally. Additionally, nearly 80% of the world’s cryogenic freezers/containers are produced in the metro Atlanta area at MVE Biological Solutions in Canton and IC Biomedical in Cartersville.