Click here for Part I

Improving individuals’ quality of life through non-drug dietary products

Rob Crim is the CEO of VAYA Pharma, a division of Enzymotec. VAYA Pharma is dedicated to helping individuals affected by lipid imbalances through the development of proprietary, non-drug dietary approaches. Lipids, a molecular group that encompasses fats and fat-soluble vitamins, play an important role in a number of the body’s natural processes, and lipid imbalance has been associated with disorders such as ADHD and memory impairment. VAYA Pharma seeks to help individuals manage these disorders with three nutrition-based products: Vayarin^®, Vayarol^®, and Vayacog^®. The company recently moved its U.S. offices from Greenville, SC, to Baltimore, where it became a member of the Maryland/Israel Development Center (MIDC), a nonprofit organization promoting trade and investment between Maryland and Israeli businesses and research institutions. VAYA Pharma’s parent company Enzymotec, based in Israel, is one of the world’s leading providers of lipid-based products and solutions. For more information, visit enzymotec.com.

Q. The company recently relocated. What drew you to Baltimore, and could you tell us about your relationship with the MIDC?

ROB CRIM: VAYA Pharma started as a pilot organization in Greenville, South Carolina of all places, which is a great place to start and to nurture a company, but once we started to reach scale and we needed new skill sets, we needed greater transportation accessibility to communicate and travel throughout both the U.S. and the world. We realized that Greenville was not the ideal spot for that. We started looking both for the talent pool that we needed as we evolved, as well as the transportation networks. We started looking everywhere from kind of the D.C. area up to New York. We met Barry in the MIDC, who is very helpful in getting us to understand the capabilities, the assets here in the Maryland area—and the Washington, D.C. area—and then very helpful executionally as well, in terms of helping us connect with potential landlords, places to stay, looking around, connecting with other people in the community here, the science community, the medical community. The MIDC was very helpful both in terms of piquing our interest in this area initially and then helping us really develop the connections and the interest, and they continue to be [helpful] as we have people move here, as we started to look potentially for permanent site to build the site here. They have been very helpful in that as well. They really helped us in everything from the kind of scoping in on the area to actually executing our move and a lot of our people’s move here as well.

Q. What factors made Maryland your top choice?

A. Maryland, for us, really rose to the top because it had the transportation. The BWI is a phenomenal airport for us, getting throughout the US—it’s a Southwest hub. It also has decent international access, which is important for us going back and forth to Israel as well as around the rest of the globe at this point—or certainly out of Dulles—so that’s been a great asset for us. We also realized that the talent pool in the whole medical area is very, very robust here—not only from some of the academic institutions and the government here, but also there’s a large amount of pharmaceutical companies between here and the Rockville area. So, there’s a very robust talent pool both scientifically as well as medically here that we found advantageous to us. And, at the same time, we realized that having an Israeli parent company, being in Maryland—there are great communities for some of our people to live in, there’s access to things that make it a very nice place for people to live, and maybe more so than some of the other areas as we looked up the Northeast. It worked out on all levels for us from the very functional levels of getting around the country and getting around internationally, to the communities that are available here, and to the talent pool. t worked out at every level for us here in Maryland.

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn

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