The “good old summertime” themed celebration featured music by the Too Tall String Band, root beer floats and speeches from a host of local and state politicians. It drew a crowd of more than 100 people to Riverside Park.

The event was the culmination of two-and-a-half years of work by the village to bring Myriad RBM to Saranac Lake.

"We did it," said Mayor Clyde Rabideau. "We brought in a new private enterprise company with growth potential here to Saranac Lake. It hasn't been done in generations. We're going to follow it up later this year with yet another company, Active Motif, and that's just the beginning. We intend to recruit and attract more businesses here to Saranac Lake."

As Rabideau spoke, Myriad employees led tours of their new facility across the street. The former village office building has been converted into a state-of-the-art facility where Myriad will manufacture and develop tests used by researchers, or for companies involved in drug discovery and development.

Henry Schnaars is Myriad's quality control manager, said the company needed room to grow. "Part of the reason we got into this larger building is we anticipate expansion within the company as a whole,” he said. “We needed the space. We needed the environment to work in. Saranac Lake has provided us with a beautiful building to work in."

Dominic Eisinger, Myriad's director of strategic development, said the biggest reason for relocation was the opportunity to be part of a budding biotech cluster in Saranac Lake centered around Trudeau Institute.

The mayor said the village is now poised to bring similar companies to the village."Until today, we didn't have a cluster," he said. "We had an idea. Now we have four companies here with synergy, with that critical mass. Now we can go out and market even more effectively than we did before. We were selling a dream before. Now we have something to show people.”

A second biotech company, Active Motif, will be relocating to Saranac Lake later this year.