By Ben Cox
Turner Scientific is the only contract research firm in the United States that specializes in hearing, the ear and balance. In December 2024, the Jacksonville firm moved from their location at 1351 Lincoln Ave. to 1275 Sandusky Rd. A ribbon-cutting event was recently held on Tuesday, May 6 to formally mark the move.
The move more than tripled their space. Renovations to the Sandusky Road location have now made it into a 60,000 square foot research facility. More renovations are still being completed with the possibility for expansion into the future.
Dr. Jeremy Turner, Chief Executive Officer of Turner Scientific, says the move was a necessary one, “In our previous facility, when we moved in 5-6 years ago, we thought we would have more room than we would ever need. Business got busy. We had more customers coming to us to do more work and we filled [that space] much quicker than we ever expected. For the last 2-3 years, we had been trying to figure out if we wanted to expand where we were at the old building, make a new add on, acquire some more land or just find an existing place. As we looked at all of the alternatives, this [new] building was available.” The Jacksonville City Council voted at the end of October 2024 to give a small expansion to the region’s enterprise zone to once again include the 1275 Sandusky Rd. location in order to accommodate Turner Scientific’s move. The expansion of the enterprise zone is a property tax abatement and a sales tax abatement on building materials. It was reported at the time of the city council’s vote that Turner was adding an additional amount of money on top of the nearly $1 million purchase price for the property with an expansion into a state-of-the-art research facility in two separate phases. The belief is that the 9.6 acres of property on which the building sits could one day become a technology park.
“We didn’t want to find ourselves in the same place in five years where we were running out of space,” Turner says, “We thought it was a good investment, went ahead and secured it and renovated it for about eight months. Now, we are using about half the space in the building but we have plenty of room for expansion in the building as we need it.”
Turner says the new space will allow them to conduct the rigorous studies required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for any type of hearing loss or ear treatments. The site contains multiple small and large animal model surgical suites, multiple sound booths for audiometric assessments, a behavioral testing core, and specialized animal housing facilities for mice, rats, guinea pigs and mini-swine. The entire facility uses a patent pending device that Turner created called the Sensory Sentinel. The device has micro sensors that can detect continuous noise and ultrasonic noise. The technology is used specifically on-site to keep noise levels low, creating a more ideal testing site for the animal test subjects.
During the ribbon-cutting event, Turner and several other staff members of Turner Scientific led guests on a tour of the facility, which highlighted an emphasis on the three “R”s: replacement, reduction and refinement. “It’s a principle that all animal researchers follow,” Turner says, “Our goal is to replace animals with non-animal models. We want to get to the point where we understand the biology well enough to put into a computer model and predict [a treatment or medicine] is going to work or not or it’s going to be safe or not. We will get there someday. We are not there now. We want to replace animals where we can. We want to reduce the number of animals we have to use by a whole variety of means. We also want to refine our methods so we use as little animals as we can, using cleaner experiments and all that goes with it.”
The new facility will allow expansion specifically for their mini-swine housing, allowing for testing on bigger animals including surgeries and behavior experiments. Chief Scientific Officer Amanda Henton, a former student of Turner’s at Illinois College turned CSO, says that the firm is currently working on research into blast-induced hearing loss and traumatic brain injuries effects on hearing loss as well as gene therapy.
Turner says that the company could have been located in a major city but he decided to bring it back to Jacksonville: “As you might imagine, a biotech company in Jacksonville is an uncommon thing. We could have gone to St. Louis, to Chicago or even Springfield and had access to other resources but we wanted to keep it here. The Illinois School for the Deaf is here. The community is here. A lot of our core research staff are here. Our hearts are here. My wife and I grew up here. Brian Chumley, our Chief Financial Officer, grew up here. So it’s home. Rather than chase down these dreams some place else, we would build what we want to build here.”
Turner says he doesn’t have a dollar figure or an exact pulse for the contribution to Jacksonville’s economic vitality, but he says it does bring new eyes and ears from beyond the city limits and even the state, “Most of the time our customers come in from out of the area. We have an Australian customer who has been here three to four times. When they come to town, sometimes three or four people at a time, they are staying at our local Airbnbs or the local hotels. They are eating dinner out at our local restaurants. We’ve had customers fly into the Jacksonville Airport from Boston. That’s unique. None of our customers are here. They are on the East Coast, [from] Europe, Australia and around the world. As a result, people in the Jacksonville community don’t really know what we do because we don’t really advertise or have a marketing push locally. It’s a unique area in that a lot of people around the world know what we do and how special and unique it is but local folks don’t.”
Elena Chrysostomou, a molecular and cellular biologist from San Diego, was one of the first five in the Jacksonville Regional Economic Development Corporation’s first round of the “Make My Move” campaign. “Dr. Mou” as she is affectionately called by her colleagues at Turner, now is participating in some of the top level research at the firm. Turner says that Chrysostomou saw how Jacksonville and Turner Scientific could further her life and career with an affordable cost of living with a highly rewarding, specialized career: “You can buy a nice home in Jacksonville and pay on a mortgage what you would have to pay rent on as a studio apartment in San Diego. While we don’t have 70-degree weather year round, we are just a two-hour plane ride to anywhere in the country.”
Turner says with the advent of AI and automation, it makes for a “cleaner” science reducing variables in experiments. He says that despite these advances, a human element will always be necessary so that people will continue to understand how science works so that more innovation can continue. In the field of audiology, Jacksonville is now connected to the world’s foremost experts in the field through the ongoing work of Turner Scientific.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the community on May 6 to unveil the new facility and provide tours also had a second occasion to mark. “BRAD” refers to Biomedical Research Awareness Day (BRAD), a global initiative led by Americans for medical progress to increase public understanding of the role of animals in biomedical research and the advancements it has made for both humans and animals. BRAD is held on the third Thursday of April annually. While Turner Scientific’s celebration was some days late, the research scientists all welcomed the public and handed out free items to commemorate Turner Scientific’s celebration of the event.
