Carilion Breaks Ground on Riverside Research Tower, Adding 800 Jobs to Innovation Corridor

Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech broke ground Thursday on a $310 million biomedical research tower on South Jefferson Street, a project executives said will bring an additional 800 research, clinical, and administrative jobs to Roanoke’s Innovation Corridor over the next four years.

The eight-story Riverside Research Tower, as it is being called, will sit between the existing Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital campus and the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, filling a long-undeveloped block that has served as a surface parking lot since the early 2000s.

“This is the project that finally stitches the two sides of Jefferson Street into one campus,” Carilion President and CEO Nancy Howell Agee said at the groundbreaking ceremony, which was attended by Governor Abigail Spanberger, Roanoke Mayor Sherman Lea, and Virginia Tech President Timothy Sands.

The tower will house research teams focused on neuroscience and cardiovascular imaging, including a new translational neuroscience center that Carilion announced late last year. About 65,000 square feet of the 280,000-square-foot building will be dedicated to wet labs.

Governor Spanberger, speaking at the ceremony, called the project “a reminder that Virginia’s biotech story isn’t only being written in Northern Virginia or Richmond — it’s being written right here on the Roanoke River.”

The project’s financing combines $140 million in tax-exempt bonds issued by the Industrial Development Authority of the City of Roanoke, $85 million in Virginia Tech capital, $60 million from Carilion, and a $25 million research infrastructure grant from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation.

Construction is being led by Atlanta-based Skanska USA Building. The tower is scheduled to open in the fall of 2029.

Economic impact projections prepared by the Roanoke Regional Partnership estimate the tower will generate $94 million in annual economic activity once fully staffed, with roughly 60% of the new positions paying more than $85,000 a year.

“Those are the kinds of salaries that keep our graduates in Roanoke rather than watching them pack up for Durham or Atlanta,” said Roanoke Regional Partnership President John Hull.

The project has not been without friction. A small group of residents from the adjacent Old Southwest Neighborhood raised concerns during a series of community meetings last fall about construction traffic and the loss of the surface lot, which has been used for overflow event parking during Roanoke Go Outside Festival and other downtown events.

Carilion has agreed to build a structured parking deck at the corner of Franklin Road and Reserve Avenue as part of the project, with 400 of its 900 spaces reserved for public event parking on nights and weekends.

Construction fencing went up on the site earlier this week. The first steel is expected to rise in late summer.