As Jerry Percifield tours the fourth-floor home of Lentigen, a one-and-a-half year-old Maryland-based start-up, he takes detailed notes and room-by-room sketches on a hefty pad of graph paper. "How many orders do you get a week?" the architect at the Atlanta-based lab design firm Lord Aeck & Sargent asks John Woolford, Lentigen's director of business planning. "What is the primary funding source? Do you have a generator on site?" Percifield is trying to understand the mission and day-to-day workings of the 18-person company, which designs and produces lentiviral vectors for researchers (see p. 66) while using the vectors to develop their own therapeutics.
Percifield sketches out a flow chart of the company's production process as Woolford answers his questions. In their current set-up within an incubator facility, Lentigen's rooms are interspersed with those of other building tenants and "you're always turning a corner to see people," Woolford ...
