24-07-2025
Maryland money brings significant upgrades to longtime Baltimore life sciences facility
Infrastructure technology projects across Maryland this summer nabbed millions in funding from the state, and a handful are centered around a former bus depot in Baltimore.
City Garage, a life sciences hub housing labs and manufacturing capacity in the region developers rebranded from Port Covington to the Baltimore Peninsula, is getting upgrades thanks to grants from the Build Our Future program out of the Maryland Department of Commerce. One of the involved recipients is the nonprofit Blackbird Laboratories, which focuses on converting academic research in new medicine and therapeutics to be commercially viable entities.
Blackbird Laboratories is building a 35,000 square-foot life sciences incubator and wet lab at City Garage to boost early-stage companies. That's about a quarter of the 120,000 square foot site. To do this, it received $2 million from Maryland as part of the grant program.
'We're extremely grateful for that support and partnership,' Emily Wilkinson, the director of finance and operations at Blackbird Laboratories, told 'and that the state's belief in what we're doing is a helpful asset to the biotech community in Baltimore and the larger Maryland region.'
Maryland granted up to $2 million to other infrastructure projects, including one for cybersecurity training in Howard County and another to build a food entrepreneurship and agricultural sustainability technologies hub in Kent County. Diagnostic firm Novel Microdevices, also based in City Garage, got $633,757 to establish a manufacturing facility for its cartridges.
City Garage stood out for this development because of the mutual life sciences focus across the facility, per Wilkinson.
'It's this whole tech hub of like-minded neighbors,' Wilkinson told 'all working for sort of the same goals.'
Practical perks go a long way
Bob Storey, the managing partner at the medical device manufacturing accelerator LaunchPort, attested to that same idea. LaunchPort received $700,000 for manufacturing capabilities at its site in City Garage.
Storey claims he was the first medical technology entrant in 2018, and pushed for more life sciences organizations and companies to move into City Garage. He started with a 10,000 space, and now he has a 30,000 square-foot space there.
It's also been rare to find facilities that house medical device manufacturing and wet labs at a single facility, Storey said.
Storey has constantly worked with fellow tenants on different projects, and he's seen workers jump from one of the facility's companies to another.
'People will move within that in a collaborative way, not raiding each other,' Storey said. 'You know, find ways to share resources.'
City Garage is also 'agnostic' to the higher education institutions in the Baltimore region. The site is close to both Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Medical System, Storey explained, meaning access to research and work without silos.
Plus, it's close to the airport and I-95, he noted, and is a single-story building to easily move in equipment. Those pragmatic factors are valuable.
'There was a practical element of it being the right single-story space that we'd get in and out easily. We had room to expand,' Storey said. 'Then we liked how it fit into the ecosystem that we envisioned was going to be developing here.'
Plans for labs, 3D printing capabilities
Blackbird Laboratories' incubator will house 10 early-stage companies, per Wilkinson. There will be a mix of private labs, offices, public workstations, a vivarium and a suite of shared equipment — part of that is 70 desks and 90 benches, she said.
'It's really designed for people who are working on drug discovery projects to be able to come in, set up shop and utilize equipment that would otherwise be difficult to obtain,' she said.
The nonprofit was founded in 2023 with a $100 million grant from the Stephen and Renee Bisciotti Foundation (Stephen also owns the Ravens). The new incubator is projected to cost $12 million, per Wilkinson. This funding from Maryland helps both offset the cost and prove the backing of the state.
Blackbird Laboratories moved its offices from the Clipper Mill area to City Garage at the end of 2024, she said, ahead of an open date for the incubator space in early 2026.
With the grant, Storey at LaunchPort is working with Baltimore investment and industrial tech commercialization firm Early Charm to boost 3D printing capabilities and electrospinning nanofiber operations — all of which can be used to tech for drug delivery and wound healing, he explained.
The state funds were announced in June, during a chaotic moment for government funding of tech ecosystems. LaunchPort and a group of other Maryland entities like the state's flagship university went after a grant from the National Science Foundation, which was focused on the intersection of neuroscience and quantum computing. The bid, valued at up to $160 million in investment, was ultimately not selected by the federal government.
Still, all of this investment in boosting US manufacturing comes at an opportune time, Storey said, as political turmoil and trade wars continue.
He's involved in a program with sovereign economic development programs in other countries to help companies abroad figure out the need for certain products in the US market, and bring manufacturing for those needs onshore.
'They can produce here,' he said. 'You start to work [on] that supply chain issue that we kind of let slip out of our hands a little bit over the past decades.'
