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Montana’s Bitterroot Valley is a major center for biotech in Montana with the presence of the NIH lab and GlaxoSmithKline. 

The history of the National Institutes of Health lab in Hamilton, Montana began at the turn of the 20th century with an outbreak of the tick-borne illness Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. The efforts of doctors and researchers on the frontier to find a vaccine for a mysterious new disease eventually led to the establishment of Rocky Mountain Labs (RML) — one of only nine federal facilities in the U.S. with the highest biosafety Level 4 capacity.

See NY Times: Is the Cure for Covid in the Rocky Mountains? A rural lab has a 120-year history of fighting mysterious diseases.

Today Rocky Mountain Labs has more than 400 employees studying the world’s most dangerous pathogens and an ecosystem of vaccine development has sprung up around the facility. A startup launched by one of the lead investigators at RML in the 1980s to develop a vaccine adjuvant was acquired by Corixa and later pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which operates a vaccine manufacturing facility in Hamilton.

In 2016, a group of highly experienced scientists from GlaxoSmithKline in Hamilton launched their own biotherapeutics company, Inimmune, in MIssoula. Inimmune’s founders helped to establish the Center for Translational Medicine at the University of Montana and in 2020 secured a $22 M Series A investment from Two Bear Capital in Whitefish, as well as more than $30 million in new NIH research grants and contracts.

Tonix Pharmaceuticals also announced plans to build a vaccine development and commercial scale manufacturing facility in Hamilton.