Biotech company prepares to begin operating from new Chehalis location
The company, which currently operates in Rochester, purchased the building in May and is about a month away from completing renovations.
Northwest Control Systems, led by CEO Roger McIntosh and Business Director and General Manager Gulnur Tuyenbayeva, started over two years ago from its parent company MAS and aims to serve the laboratory community with high quality and innovative fluid handling and automation solutions. It specializes in automation for laboratories, factories and industrial processes, offering products such as controller boards, reader assemblies, pressure sensors, as well as materials used for research purposes.
"It's a broad variety of components used primarily for automating different industrial processes," McIntosh said. "And, up until now, it's focused very much on biotech applications, like instruments that are used for analysis of biological samples."
McIntosh and Tuyenbayeva have mostly been operating as a two-person unit and have been searching for a new facility for over a year, and they made offers on 16 different properties in the Lewis County area before landing on the South Market Boulevard property. They hope the 2,400-square foot building will expand not only their operations but their staffing, as McIntosh stated that the company is looking to hire one to two employees with experience and knowledge in science, technology and/or engineering.
"One of the things that we need very soon is we would like to hire up to two employees. Operating from someplace 20 to 30 miles out in the country is not ideal for attracting the type of employees that we want," McIntosh said of the decision to relocate to Chehalis. "One of the key components is that we have a good layout within the building so we can have a nice conference room to work with clients and we have enough room to do the limited type of manufacturing and testing that we do on our components."
McIntosh said the building, which was built in 1935 and previously housed a company that published a logging newspaper, was in good condition upon purchase but needed a few renovations, including a new roof, exterior and interior painting, new flooring, paving for the parking area, and more.
Northwest Control Systems is beginning a new project in the near future in which it will convert waste biomass to purified chemicals and energy, McIntosh said. This succeeds another recent innovation by the company that isolates single cells from tissue samples, enabling DNA sequencing at the cell level to help identify specific mutations in cancer cells.
"It's a very interesting process that the customer has developed to automate the process of taking waste organic material and loading it into an oven," McIntosh said. "Then it's a surprisingly complex process where you have to very precisely adjust the mixture of various gasses within this oven and monitor the output of the materials. Ultimately, you're taking waste biomass and producing high volume chemicals and energy. We'll definitely need additional employee help for that."
McIntosh said the company is expanding to also serve the factory automation market. In addition to biotech, he has been involved in this market over the years as well.
"Some of the components and some of the operations are not so different between automating factory and automating laboratory operations. We're intending to locate companies within the general area, and it could be as far away as Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle, Spokane," McIntosh said. "We've got a company in Spokane we're working with now to help automate industrial processes as well as laboratory processes."
Additionally, Northwest Control Systems has dabbled in artificial intelligence. McIntosh said one AI-based product the company has been working on is close to coming to market.
"It's an AI-based software product to essentially create automation scripts for laboratories and could be for factories, as well," he said. "It actually saves a tremendous amount of time. It cuts the overall development time for a system like that probably in half. It's definitely a big advancement and something that we've been involved in for a while."
To learn more about Northwest Control Systems and its products, visit northwestcontrolsystems.com.
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