Made in Colorado (Winter 2023): BioBUBBLE’s 38 Year Journey

There’s a common misconception that the United States doesn’t manufacture much anymore. In reality, the country continues to out-manufacture China on a per capita basis, and domestic growth outpaced the global average for the first time in years in late 2022.

Colorado is a case in point. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector peaked in 1998 at 192,200 workers. That plummeted to 122,200 employees in 2010, but the state’s manufacturing workforce has steadily grown to surpass 150,000 as of late 2023.

With these dynamics front and center, this year’s “Made in Colorado” profiles illuminate 10 of the state’s pioneering manufacturers, makers of whiskey, satellites and just about everything in between. Today, we’re highlighting Autonomous Tent Co, the world’s first movable five-star hotel.

READ: Inside the Colorado Semiconductor Industry Renaissance — CHIPS Act Sparks Manufacturing Revival

BioBUBBLE

Medical

Fort Collins, Colorado

Website: www.biobubble.com

Chuck Spengler started bioBUBBLE in 1985 to bring a soft-sided cleanroom to the research market and soon relocated the company to Northern Colorado. “He came up with the simple method to filter the air and fit the needs of those studies for those purposes, whether it’s protecting the study itself or protecting users,” says Dylan Miller, bioBUBBLE’s sales and design manager.

“We can basically take an empty warehouse or in a larger empty room and create separate spaces within that room that would allow you to potentially run two different and concurrent studies, or just to provide some level of environmental separation for whatever that need is.”

Much of the market has recently gravitated to benchtop biocontainment enclosures for research and pharmaceutical development applications that don’t require an entire room. “We are able to provide essentially a more customized and cheaper option to some of the larger biosafety cabinets that are out there,” Miller says. “Really, it’s just scale. Our materials are extremely modular and easy to manipulate, so we can do a wide variety of sizes with the same principle.

“Our big thing is the user’s ability to interact with the equipment,” he adds. “We have a lot more control over the size of openings, where they can be and things like that, and that just allows us to give the customer a more tailored product.”

The 13-employee company is based out of a 10,000-square-foot facility. After the design phase, bioBUBBLE cuts vinyl on an automated table and uses RF welding and heat sealing to create walls. The company relies on a contract manufacturer for metal parts for HEPA filters.

During the pandemic, bioBUBBLE helped UCLA and Cornell University establish COVID-19 testing systems, expanding the company’s skill set and catalyzing growth. “There were a lot of unique projects coming out of that, and that started to help us gain more traction, especially in the automation space,” Miller says.

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected].