Top Life Science Employers in Maryland, 2020

The combination of a booming biotech market with an additional surge of hiring by vaccine and diagnostic companies in Maryland has resulted in record-low unemployment and competition for talent at an all-time high. As a result, the job market is weighted heavily in the candidate’s favor.  This has many companies investing more into making their company a top choice for candidates by focusing on things such as culture, employee engagement, community service, and giving, along with other perks that attract and retain top talent.  

In a candidate-driven market, the recognition as a top employer signals to candidates which companies really value their employees and have fostered an employee-centric culture. This is an incredible advantage in the war for talent.

“The companies we, as employees, are most proud to work for are the same companies who most value our work,” shared Adam Van Bavel, Head of Marketing and Business Development at Workforce Genetics.

“Employers that focus on their culture and actively listening to their employees are able to better support their growth and development,” Van Bavel emphasized. “These are the unicorns. Companies that focus on culture and community are the ones who not only endure hard times but also find ways to thrive.”

Top workplace and best places to work awards are given out to employers across a wide range of media and award platforms and present a great way for a company to differentiate itself amongst other options for job seekers.

Here is a list of recent awards that have been bestowed upon some well-known and up-and-coming BioHealth Capital Region (BHCR) life science companies.

Catalent Pharma

Named by Top Employers Institute as a Top Employer in United States – Glassdoor rating: 3.2 

Catalent Pharma (NYSE: CTLT), which purchased Maryland’s Paragon Bioservices in 2019, was recently awarded a Top Employers United States of America certificate by the Top Employers Institute. 

Catalent has also recently partnered with Novavax, which is located in Gaithersburg, Maryland; Catalent’s acquisition of Paragon Bioservices and its partnership with Novavax has significantly expanded the company’s footprint in Maryland. Paragon BioServices, now Catlent’s Paragon Gene Therapy Unit, was a home-grown Maryland biotech company that started in a Baltimore incubator 30 years ago.

Paragon Bioservices had grown to more than 400 employees and was just two weeks away from beginning production in a brand new 150,000 square foot state-of-the-art, world-class GMP manufacturing facility for gene therapies when the Catalent acquisition was announced. In the Novavax deal, Paragon Gene Therapy has assumed the leases to two Novavax product development and manufacturing facilities, “…giving it immediate access to state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment, people and space to accelerate the growth of its gene therapy development and manufacturing business.” according to Catalent’s press release on the deal. 

Catalent was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Somerset, New Jersey; the company employs more than 10,000 staff across Europe and North and South America, providing services to biological entities, biosimilars, gene therapies, and antibody-drug conjugates. Catalent has helped companies get 20 products approved for commercial use in its history. 

RoosterBio, Inc.

Ranked by Washington Post Top Workplaces for the Small Company Category – Glassdoor rating: 4.5

RoosterBio, located in Frederick, Maryland, has been named by The Washington Post as a 2020 Top Workplace in the Washington, D.C. region. Rooster Bio was selected based on third-party acquired employee feedback. The employee survey that determined the winners measured feedback on workplace culture, alignment, execution, and connection. 

RoosterBio also won a Frederick County Best Places to Work award in 2019 and a Top 50 Places to Work award from Frederick Magazine in 2020, making the Washington Post designation the third such top workplaces award the company has earned since 2019.

is a stem cell manufacturing company that works side-by-side with regenerative medicine product developers, tissue engineers, cell therapists, and synthetic biologists to advance research and therapies across the globe.

RoosterBio started with five staff members during its days in the Frederick Innovative Technology Center (FITCI) incubator. Fast forward a few years, and RoosterBio is at the cutting-edge of supporting advanced biomanufacturing processes critical to personalized medicine development. RoosterBio  develops standardized stem cell products that are ‘ready to use’ or ‘plug and play.“ RoosterBio’s stem cell products simplify the process of incorporating living cells into a new medical product that is being developed.

RoosterBio began 2020 with plans to add an additional 5,000 square feet of space to its 15,500 sq/ft Maryland cGMP manufacturing facility. The move was to position the company to expand its global cell manufacturing solution portfolio throughout the Asia Pacific and European markets. 

United Therapeutics

Ranked by Washington Post Top Workplaces for the Medium Size Company Category. – Glassdoor rating: 3.2

United Therapeutics (Nasdaq: UTHR), located in Silver Spring, Maryland, was named a Top Place to Work in the medium-size company category by the Washington Post. This comes on the heels of United Therapeutics being named a Great Place to Work by Fortune and a Top Place to Work by the Washington Post in 2019. 

Martine Rothblatt, United Therapeutics’ CEO, is a lawyer, author, futurist, entrepreneur and one of the most successful and innovative business leaders in the world. She is one of the co-founders of Sirius XM radio, which she left post-IPO to move into biotech. Her move into the biotech field was inspired by her daughter’s battle with pulmonary arterial hypertension, which was a fatal diagnosis at the time. Her daughter was only five years old at diagnosis. 

Rothblatt founded United Therapeutics to literally save her daughter’s life, and that’s exactly what she did. After an exhaustive process, she was able to convince GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to license a molecule to her and her team of scientists, which they then developed into Remodulin. Today Remodulin generates approximately $1B a year in revenue for United Therapeutics and has helped pulmonary arterial hypertension patients, including her own daughter, live healthy lives.

United Therapeutics is now exploring organ manufacturing, specifically the manufacture of genetically modified lungs developed in cloned pigs that resist rejection by the human body. Rothblatt and United Therapeutics believe that Xenotransplantation, or the engineering of animals to be organ donors.

Emmes Corporation 

Ranked by Frederick Best Places to Work for the Large Company Category, and Washington Post Top Workplaces for the Large Company Category — Glassdoor rating: 3.5 

The Emmes Corporation, headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, was named a Frederick, Maryland Best Place to Work and a Washington Post Top Place to work by the Washington Post. The Emmes Corporation also has offices in Frederick, Boston, Canada and India.

Emmes Corporation is the largest woman-led organization in the BHCR and is led by Dr. Anne Lindblad, who started her career at Emmes in 1982 as a biostatistician and now serves as the company’s President. Established in 1977, Emmes is a Contract Research Organization (CRO) that provides numerous public health-related services to a wide range of clients, including academic institutions, non-profit organizations, and pharmaceutical/biotech companies.  Emmes has also worked closely with numerous governmental organizations, such as the NIH, DoD, and FDA, to improve public health worldwide.

VaLogic, LLC

Named Frederick Best Places to Work for the Medium to Large Employer Category – Glassdoor rating: N/A

Valogic, LLC, headquartered in Frederick, Maryland was recently named one of Frederick’s Best Places to Work. The Frederick County Best Places to Work Campaign is a joint program between the Frederick County Office of Economic Development, Frederick County Workforce Services, The City of Frederick Department of Economic Development, and the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce.

Founded in 2002, VaLogic is a life science-focused risk management services and GMP consulting organization. VaLogic assists life science organizations with risk mitigation across a wide range of inflection points, including product development, ground-up new facility and renovation/expansion builds, general facility management and GMP operations. The company’s mission is to reduce overall risk, speed up production development timelines and secure the supply chain. In 2010, the company opened a 6,000 SF office in Frederick, which they expanded to 15,000 SF in 2017 to accommodate its growing staff and expanding client portfolio.