They needed to have an interest in science. They needed to be girls. And they needed to be doing quite well in their classes. That’s all it took to be chosen as participants from area school districts to participate in the first-ever “Girls in Science Weekend” at YMCA Storer Camps in Napoleon Township this past weekend.

It’s official! Based on a site visit back in May, AAALAC International has renewed our full accreditation.

Dan and Samantha Ross had just built a 4,000-square-foot log cabin for themselves in Jackson County when their employer, the drug giant Pfizer Inc., announced it was closing its sprawling campus in Ann Arbor. They could have taken another position with Pfizer in Connecticut, but they had no intention of leaving. So the couple took an entrepreneurial plunge. Together, they founded TransPharm Preclinical Solutions LLC, a fast-growing biotech company based in Napoleon Township, a small community in southern Jackson County.

TransPharm Preclinical Solutions, a life sciences company in rural Napoleon Township, celebrated its 10-year anniversary on January 2, 2018. With 100+ clients from all over the world, it has already earned over $12 million.

Transferring scientific knowledge from the real world to the classroom has been at the heart of a new partnership formed this summer between TransPharm Preclinical solutions in Napoleon and the Columbia School District in Brooklyn.

Nanoviricides’ drug candidates led to complete survival of small animals lethally infected with an aggressive and neurotropic strain of HSV-1.

One of Jackson County’s first life sciences companies is working to help fight bacteria that are harming — and in some cases, killing — hospital patients across the country.

TransPharm Preclinical Solutions in Napoleon Township is currently doing research for a company that is trying to find a cure for Clostridium difficile, which can cause severe intestinal damage and diarrhea for hospital patients. No therapies are currently available to fight the strain of bacteria that the company is working with, TransPharm owner Dan Ross said.

TransPharm Preclinical Solutions in Napoleon Township has been recognized as one of 2011’s “Michigan 50 Companies to Watch” by the Cassopolis-based Edward Lowe Foundation. TransPharm will be honored at an award ceremony during the seventh annual Michigan Celebrates Small Business event April 28 in Lansing. President and CEO Dan Ross said the award is a great accomplishment for his company.

Dan Ross is another example of the pharmaceutical industry’s cutbacks spawning Michigan entrepreneurship — and another example of how the Michigan Small Business and Technology Development Center helps companies grow. Ross, trained as a veterinary technician was a surgical technician at Wayne State University and later an associate scientist at Parke-Davis in Ann Arbor, staying through its transition to Pfizer Inc. ownership. But when Pfizer announced in 2007 it was shutting down its Ann Arbor research operations, Ross was already thinking about striking out on his own.

Michigan suffered one heck of a body blow in January 2007. That’s when Pfizer, the world’s largest drugmaker, said it was shutting down its Ann Arbor, MI, research and development center, and eliminating 2,400 jobs. That’s usually the end of the story, as hardly anybody keep tracks of what happens to a talented group of people like that as they scatter to the wind. But many of the people who honed their skills inside Pfizer and other big companies have found new entrepreneurial outlets to keep doing what they do best at a growing array of contract research organizations (CROs).