M Square, a 128-acre university research park near the College Park Metro station, has signed its first tenant for its brand-new Technology Ventures Building.
The tenant, MXF Technologies, Inc., a new technology company that manufactures lenses for X-rays, will hire as many as 30 undergraduate and graduate students within its first year in the space, said Michael Champ, the research and manufacturing company’s executive vice president.
The Technology Ventures Building will house several small start-up companies that work with experimental technology and are more student-friendly than government agencies for jobs and internships, using the complex’s proximity to the university to their advantage.
Smaller technology companies such as MXF tend to have more flexibility in hiring students for temporary positions because of their size, said Brian Darmody, university assistant vice president for research and economic development.
The building is left over from engineering labs that have relocated to the new Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building.
Once finished, M Square is expected to have as much as 3 million square feet and as many as 7,000 employees – a significant percentage of which will be students, Darmody said.
In the years to come, MXF will require hundreds of employees. The company started in November 2004 and has already moved into the space. It will hire students to work in cycles of 10 to 15 people at a time in the coming months.
Being near the university is a perk of the location for its tenants, Darmody said.
“That’s probably the biggest asset.” he said. “It’s near a lot of bright undergrads and grad students.”
The company’s filtering lenses allow X-rays in hospitals and research labs to separate different wavelengths to allow doctors and scientists to view isolated cancer cells. The process is similar to seeing only one color through a prism.
The company currently has three employees who have received their doctoral degrees from the university and expects many more in the future.
The space the company is renting includes a state-of-the-art clean room, pumped with purified air to ensure dust particles stay out of the room.
“We want our filters to be clean as possible so our X-rays don’t hit any particles,” Champ said.
The air in the room contains fewer than 1,000 particles per cubic foot of air.
“It’s really good air,” he said.
The company already manufactures its lenses to researchers at the University of Maryland, the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins University. MXF Technologies is still looking for FDA approval for its X-ray lenses. Once approved, it hopes to offer them to more than 80,000 hospitals nationwide.
Contact staff writer Patrick Reaves at reavesdbk@gmail.com.
