Southwest Tennessee Community College feeding local biotech industry technicians

Memphis Business Journal
October 26, 2007
By Toby Sells

If Memphis' biotechnology future prevails, Southwest Tennessee Community Collegenwants to make sure homegrown talent is filling the white lab coats.

For the past five years, the college has been building an associate degree program in applied science that would produce biotechnology technicians. These technicians aren't necessarily scientists. They don't prove or disprove ideas, but they do a lot of the work along the way. Now, two students have begun their internships at InMotion Musculoskeletal Institute and, in the spring, will be the program's first graduates.

"The growing need for this kind of work force was the major driving component for the program," says Amy Beth Waddell, the program's adviser. "With the UT center and other biotech companies coming in, we thought it was a good idea and we talked to the Memphis Bioworks Foundation to try to develop a program."

That program had only five students register for its first semester at Southwest. By the end of that first semester, two were left. Alan Yee and Anley Teshale say they stuck with the program because they had heard jobs in the field were coming.

"I didn't know what it was, really," Yee says about when he first learned of the biotechnician program. "There seemed to be a certain amount of buzz about it, though. (Southwest teachers) were telling us the reason the program was started was because there were going to be so many jobs here that needed to be filled with people with these kinds of backgrounds."

Yee used to cook at Brooklyn Bridge Italian Restaurant and now works in a couple of music instrument stores while he's in school. Fellow intern Teshale now drives a cab. He said he went to Southwest simply to get a better job. When his, like Yee's, first application to the radiology program was denied, he turned to the new biotech program.

He says he's not worried about being among the first in the program "because we've heard a lot from our teachers and from doing this internship now, we don't feel any kind of anxiety. I think we will have better prospects after school."

InMotion's biologics and biomechanics research assistant Michelle Mary agrees.

"I don't think they'll have any problems finding jobs, especially with this hands-on experience behind them," she says. "It will certainly help them to have exposure to both the biologics lab and the biomechanics lab here."

Waddell says Southwest's program will teach its now 31 students basic molecular biology and biochemistry techniques, like how to make a solution and how to keep a lab running. The internship, she says, will give them a real-world look at the industry.

"This will certainly give them a leg up," Waddell says.

Yee and Teshale will learn laboratory safety, microscopy, biomechanical testing and the culturing of cells among other things during their internship.

"This is sort of like cooking, I guess," jokes Yee, the former cook. "You're mixing things up and seeing what you get."

Southwest Tennessee Community College

Two-year college
President: Nathan Essex
Main campus: 5983 Macon Cove
Phone: (901) 333-5000
Web site: www.southwest.tn.edu

InMotion Musculoskeletal Institute

Non-profit orthopedic research laboratory
Executive director: Dick Tarr
Address: 20 S. Dudley, Suite 700
Phone: (901) 271-0000
Web site: www.inmotionmemphis.org

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