South Jersey’s ultracold vault keeps blood cells, brain tissue, and DNA ready for medical research

Keith and Jenny DiMarino were expecting their third child 11 years ago when they got e-mails that promoted the preservation of stem cells from their baby’s umbilical cord.

The couple opted not to do so, but the concept fascinated Keith DiMarino, who was then growing the South Jersey document storage business he established in 2003. He went on to expand and relocate his DocuVault facility several times, and in 2021, he launched GenVault, an ultracold biorepository capable of preserving 60 million frozen samples of blood plasma and serum, brain and other human or animal tissues, and vaccines.

Cell lines — identical copies produced by culturing a single cell — also are stored at GenVault and can number in the millions. They’re raw materials of research into prevention and treatment of diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, addiction, and COVID-19 at the cellular and genetic level.

“We’re not a laboratory. We’re a storage facility, and the life sciences boom is driving a need for more storage facilities,” DiMarino said as he led a tour of the five-story, 500,000-square-foot DocuVault and GenVault complex in West Deptford, Gloucester County. He is the president and chief executive officer of the company, which has 100 employees.

Institutional, academic, and commercial enterprises nationwide, including those in major life sciences hubs such as Philadelphia, are involved in such research and create opportunities for private businesses such as GenVault.

“There are other biorepositories,” said DiMarino, 45, who lives in Wayne with his wife, a former educator, and their four children. “But I don’t think there’s another biorepository like this.”

DiMarino cited his customized vertical storage design, abundantly redundant fire suppression, power, and security systems, and GenVault’s more than 25-vehicle transportation fleet. Transport vehicles include refrigerated tractor-trailers able to transport an entire laboratory’s worth of materials across the country.

Executive director Emily Young likened GenVault to a “biological library” that picks up and delivers.

“We’re an archive of materials used by academic as well as pharmaceutical researchers,” she said. “We can retrieve their sample within six minutes and get it out the door to them in two hours. We can do rapid retrieval because we know precisely where everything is.”

While North and Central New Jersey are known for their concentration of corporate pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities, South Jersey has not been widely recognized — even within the Philly region — as an emerging life sciences cluster.

Nonetheless, Camden has been home to the Coriell Institute for Medical Research since 1953. In recent years the city also has seen the opening of the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University as well as the Joint Center for Health Sciences, a collaboration among Rowan, Cooper, Rutgers University-Camden, and Camden County College. And last month, Rowan University and Virtua Health announced plans for the Virtua Health College of Medicine & Life Sciences, a new facility that will include a research component.

» READ MORE: Rowan University and Virtua Health unveil plans for new college of medicine and health

“The future is very promising,” said Jean-Pierre Issa, president and CEO of Coriell. The nonprofit is in the early stages of planning a major expansion in Camden, including a new headquarters.

Issa said Coriell also is partnering with Cooper and Rowan to create a cancer research facility in South Jersey significant enough to be recognized and designated a cancer center by the National Cancer Institute. And he welcomed the presence of a private company like GenVault to serve the needs of researchers throughout the Philly region and bolster the life sciences support infrastructure in South Jersey.

Dan Keashen, spokesman for the Rowan University-Rutgers Camden Joint Board of Governors — which oversees the Joint Center for Health Sciences — said the expansion of facilities and growth of partnerships make the city “ripe for new investments” in the life sciences.

“The biosciences and their growth are critical to the eds and meds corridor in the city that is [collectively] the largest employer in the tri-county area,” he said.

Issa said further life sciences growth would depend on more state support focused on making incubator space and facilities available for basic science research.

“There’s a huge opportunity for South Jersey, but in order to take advantage of this you need a critical mass of infrastructure and science in the region,” he said. “We need to do everything that Philadelphia has done.”

DiMarino started DocuVault in 2003 after renting a 3,000-square-foot former food warehouse in Woodbury, where he grew up.

“It still smelled like barbecue sauce, but the rent was good and it was in my hometown,” he said.

He said his father, Anthony J. DiMarino Jr., the director of the Digestive Health Institute at Thomas Jefferson University, was an early investor in the fledgling document storage business.

The company quickly outgrew the Woodbury warehouse, moved to and outgrew a rented space in Woodbury Heights, and relocated to two other Gloucester County spots before DiMarino designed and purpose-built a new facility for DocuVault on Imperial Drive in West Deptford in 2016.

There was enough ground on the 10½-acre site to allow for construction of the biorepository that was taking shape in his imagination, said DiMarino, whose father told him how preserved serum from the blood of American military recruits in the late 1940s shed light on the prevalence of celiac disease.

“I couldn’t believe it at first,” DiMarino said. “It’s so powerful to realize we are able to test blood from the 1940s, and how valuable and important [preserved] blood can be.”

Construction began in 2019; the entire complex cost more than $25 million to build. Young was a job applicant when she first saw the work-in-progress in 2019 and heard DiMarino describe how he planned to make it operable.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” she said. “Such an expansive space but used so efficiently. Keith is a visionary leader.”

DiMarino also credits his dad with “teaching me to really take care” of his clients. He worked with Young — who has 20 years of commercial laboratory experience — to provide for remote visual inspection and other technologies to reassure researchers that GenVault is taking proper care of their cell lines and other essential components involved in what may be their life’s work.

“We will place a camera directly in front of their inventory, and they can have a private viewing session any time,” DiMarino said. “They just want to know it’s there.”

Young said a good number of clients are dividing their samples between two or more locations, just in case. Others entrust not only their samples with GenVault but store written materials involving their research at DocuVault.

“There are a lot of [storage] synergies,” she said. “Researchers also produce lab books, endnotes, documents and other paperwork.”

Given that a cell line could be used to provide treatment or even a cure for a rare illness, or in as-yet unknown ways, “there’s no limit on how irreplaceable” the frozen samples could be, said Young, who described GenVault and its employees as “the stewards” of materials that could play a role in future medical breakthroughs.

“A lot of our clients are doing rare disease research,” DiMarino said. “We can help them succeed in their quest for a cure.”