For much of the 20th Century, tobacco was king in downtown Durham, NC, where manufacturers built sprawling brick industrial complexes to produce millions of cigarettes, which were sent out by rail to the world.
The Chesterfield Building, the former flagship plant of Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, employed several generations of workers until it was shuttered in 1999, and then sat vacant. Now, the building is being transformed into a center for biomedical research, including BioLabs North Carolina, a unique co-working space for life science startups.
CREO Senior Partner for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Joan Siefert Rose takes us on a tour of the facility in her role as CEO of LaunchBio, a nonprofit helping early stage life science companies access resources and capital, and a partner organization to BioLabs North Carolina. The video is courtesy of StoryDriven Media.