March 25, 2025 - John Knowles, Studio B Writer - The BioCapital Region, which includes Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, is one of the top life sciences clusters in the United States.
Prince William County has rapidly emerged as a key player in Northern Virginia’s life sciences sector. The Prince William County Department of Economic Development and Tourism, or PWCDEDT, has been focused on diversifying the economy and leveraging assets like George Mason University’s Science and Technology Campus to attract innovative companies to the region.
PWCDEDT Deputy Director Trevor Johnson said that the county’s life sciences growth can be traced back to its abundant rural land, offering a rare opportunity for expansion in the Greater Washington area.
“Prince William County was a rural community in the 1980s, but our elected officials knew then that it wasn’t going to stay that way,” he said. “With Prince William being close to D.C., we wanted to present residents with more local opportunities instead of commuting outside of the county for jobs. We were able to build a partnership with GMU in the 1990s to start building our life sciences industry and begin the early stages of what's now known as Innovation Park.”
Innovation Park is a 1,500-acre university-anchored research park in the heart of Prince William County. The research park has brought thousands of jobs to the area, he said. Organizations such as the American Type Culture Center, or ATCC, a 100K SF global resource center providing scientists with biomaterials to conduct life science research, have chosen to set up headquarters there.
In 2010, GMU’s Biomedical Research Laboratory, in partnership with the National Institutes of Health, helped advance groundbreaking work on the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of infectious diseases.
“These early moves shaped Innovation Park into a place where government, academia and industry work together to push research forward while driving economic growth,” Johnson said.
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