Western North Carolina

The Western Office of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center and its working partners are catalyzing economic development and job creation in the region. Those goals are achieved through business, workforce training and strengthening research in medicinal herbs.

Renowned for its exceptional geographic and cultural appeal, Western North Carolina is awakening to an important natural relationship with the life sciences.

The region’s extraordinary biodiversity contributes to its rich history in the medicinal use of natural plants and herbs – though only a small fraction of the area’s estimated 2,500 plant species have so far been examined for those uses.

The region’s potential in natural products, forestry and agriculture are “turning on the lights” in regional research labs, says Cheryl McMurry, director of the Western Office of the Biotechnology Center.

For instance, broadaxes and dibbles have given way to new tools such as molecular biology, chemistry, bioinformatics and molecular modeling to provide commercialization opportunities and to infuse a new economic vitality, thanks to the area’s universities and entrepreneurs.

UNC-Asheville, Appalachian State University and Western Carolina University have expanded their research departments and are participating in technology transfer efforts to get their inventions to the marketplace.

Increasingly, said John F.A.V. Cecil, president of Biltmore Farms and member of the 25-member Advisory Committee for Biotechnology in Western North Carolina, the tools of biotechnology hold the key to cultivation of rare medicinal herbs so those in the wild can repopulate, undisturbed.

Improved biofuel production may result from installing genes leading to superior strains of rapeseed that can lower the cost of converting this “weed” into a powerful, domestically generated petroleum substitute.

“In short,” says McMurry, “the Western Region is active, enthusiastic and progressing rapidly to establish biotechnology as a viable economic development engine.”