Biomedical company plans move to SIRTI

Signature Genomic Laboratories LLC, a rapidly growing local biomedical company, is about to become the first commercial medical company to take up residence in the new SIRTI Technology Center, SIRTI and SGL officials say.

SGL will move in phases and expects to be fully operational in its new quarters by the end of the year.

The company has outgrown the 1,200 square feet of space it’s been leasing in the Health Resource Center, on the Sacred Heart Medical Center campus, said Dr. Bassem Bejjani, the laboratory’s co-founder and medical director.

“The hospital’s been wonderful, but they ran out of space, and we needed to grow,” Bejjani said.

SGL signed a two-year lease on about 10,600 square feet of space, about half of which will be laboratories, said Linda Hemingway, SIRTI’s director of market development.

She said the new tenant will raise the SIRTI Tech Center occupancy rate to 80 percent.

The laboratory’s presence enhances the efforts of the SIRTI-based Institute for Systems Medicine, which is working to establish Spokane’s first biomedical research institute, Hemingway said.

Established in 2003, SGL has grown from 12 employees who handled 300 cases a year to 34 employees who by the end of the year are expected to have analyzed 6,000 cases from as far as Brazil, Ireland, Israel and Argentina, Bejjani said.

The company pioneered the most discriminating method yet for conducting chromosome analysis. The tests are instrumental in diagnosing a host of birth defects and mental retardation.

SGL’s success is putting Spokane on the biomedical research map, Bejjani added.

“Spokane has become a stop for a lot of people (experts) who come here to talk with us and learn about our technology,” he said.

Bejjani predicts the lab’s caseload will double next year, which could necessitate the need to hire six to nine more employees.

Spokane is primed for similar ventures, he said. The region’s universities are producing top young scientists who are ably staffing SGL’s labs, the cost of doing business is competitive, and the area is accessible by air and is very livable.

SGL is privately owned by Sacred Heart Medical Center, Pathology Associates Medical Laboratories and its founders, Bejjani and Lisa G. Shaffer.