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States Are Looking to Grow Their Biotech Sectors
Getting a piece of the biotechnology industry to boost a state economy is a great idea, but it’s complicated. Successfully incubating a regional biotech cluster requires more than building million-dollar laboratories and hoping top researchers appear, Shaila Dewin reports in the New York Times.
Despite the challenges, 27 states paid up to $100,000 for a spot on the exhibition floor at the annual Biotechnology Industry Organization International Convention last month. The Convention is the largest assembly of the biotechnology industry and attracted over 20,000 participants this year, including industry executives, scientists, and politicians.
The numbers make it clear why states are vying for biotech companies to do business in their cities; BIO indicates that each job in the bioscience sector creates 5.8 additional jobs in the national economy, and every dollar of National Institutes of Health funding generates more than twice that amount in state economic output.
Several experts on innovation clusters—the regional hubs like California’s tech-heavy Silicon Valley or metropolitan Boston, a major life sciences center—have taken in-depth looks on Science Progress at the policies and partnerships that can foster their growth and boost regional economies.
Cities in the biotech game should capitalize on their existing strengths, like Atlanta with its Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Dewin writes. As well, Pennsylvania complemented its own state resources when it formed the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, a nonprofit biotechnology initiative that provides support for entrepreneurial life-sciences enterprises, in 2000. Since Pennsylvania has the third-highest number of colleges and universities in the United States, PLSG took advantage of university research grants and helped commercialize university technologies, which benefit from nearby regional markets. Using already available assets may be crucial since there is a real threat of losing the benefits—including jobs—of biotech developments to other innovation clusters if companies need to relocate to access other resources, Dewin wrote.
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