Montgomery County's showcase bioscience park is the 288-acre Shady Grove Life Sciences Center in Rockville, which officials say was the first biopark in the nation to be exclusively zoned for that purpose when it was developed in the 1980s.

Some of the first companies there were launched by former National Institutes of Health scientists wanting to branch out or try to commercialize an idea. While some have fled or merged into others, numerous companies have stayed for more than a decade, including EntreMed and BioReliance.

"The biotech community is one of ebb and flow," said Elaine Amir, executive director of Johns Hopkins' Montgomery campus, which opened in 1988. "It takes a long time to bring a product to commercialization. You have to be prepared for companies coming and going, and reinventing themselves."

The Rockville campus, which has grown to some 4,000 students and 450 faculty members, is working to create more links with Hopkins researchers in Baltimore, as well as with private biotechs and other Maryland universities, Amir said. Some 12 companies or organizations have set up in the campus' corporate wing. The Intercounty Connector's completion will make such linkages between Baltimore and Montgomery easier, she said.

"We're looking to add on to that," Amir said. "We'd like to help wipe out the line between Baltimore and Montgomery County."

The campus also holds many key biotech events, including a recent conference linking Spanish and Maryland biotech executives. Several Spanish executives noted that Maryland has an excellent reputation in the field in their country.

While Hopkins has plans to expand its Rockville campus, officials are working on an ambitious plan to form a massive mixed-use bio community with much more research space, housing, retail and recreation, with the Shady Grove center as the nucleus. The idea will be along the lines of mixed-use research communities in Cambridge, Mass., and Palo Alto, Calif., Amir said. The Montgomery County Planning Department released a preliminary draft for the Gaithersburg West Master Plan this year.

"No one else has the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Standards and Technology, the FDA and other federal agencies in their backyards," Amir said. "We have all the elements of an extraordinary biotech community. What we're lacking is the interconnectivity. .. We have to think differently."

In Montgomery, plans are also in the works for a 40-acre Science and Technology Park on Montgomery College's Germantown campus, with a groundbreaking as soon as late 2010. Another biopark is planned around the FDA headquarters in the White Oak area in the eastern part of the county.