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Emerging hubs compete for life science business By Peter Gwynne More than two decades ago, California's Bay Area and "Genetown," the Boston/Cambridge sector of Massachusetts, pioneered the concept of life science clusters that act as nurseries for start-up biotechnology firms and other companies involved in biology. More recently, North Carolina's Research Triangle followed that example. Aiming to emulate those successes, other regions have begun to promote their own credentials as life science hubs. Few regions expect to compete directly with the Big Three. But organizers of emerging hubs believe that they have the intellectual power in specific sectors of life science that will attract established and spin-off companies, as well as the top-drawer scientists they need to help boost their local economies. "The critical requirements are very strong university research with the best researchers and a culture of entrepreneurial sciences," said C. Michael Cassidy, president and CEO of the Georgia Research Alliance. "You've got to have management talent to take ideas out of the laboratory and build them into businesses." Well-trained support workers also help. "The workforce is critical," said Steven Bares, executive director of the Memphis Bioworks Foundation. "It's the first thing that companies look for." Local service organizations that conduct clinical trials, organize marketing agreements, work with regulatory agencies, and distribute products are equally important. Basic needs Debbie Hart, president of the Biotechnology Council of New Jersey, summed up the basic needs for a life science hub. "You need the support of government programs, a strong workforce, and promising research," she said. "Once you have those, everything grows from them. You'll attract the biotechnology companies and service providers." Location has its own value. "Capital markets are an hour away by train in New York City, and the National Institutes of Health is an hour away by train in Washington, DC," said Thomas Morr, president of Select Greater Philadelphia, a cluster that includes 11 counties in northern Delaware, southern New Jersey, and southeast Pennsylvania. "And we're within two hours' flight of 60% of the population of the United States and Canada." Several emerging hubs, including New Jersey and greater Philadelphia, have the advantage of a historical foundation in the form of established pharmaceutical firms that have created a corporate environment comfortable with the life science industry. Locales that aim to build their hubs from scratch have a more difficult task. "First and foremost, you need a community or regional vision of what you would like to be when you grow up," said William Duncan, president of Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute. "Having community alignment is critical," Bares added. "Everyone in local politics, research, hospitals, and industry must be involved and on the same page." Slow and steady Success as a hub tends to come steadily rather than quickly. For example, the Georgia Research Alliance started to look at bioscience in 1990. "But it was in 1996 that we began in earnest to build opportunities and develop a life science cluster here," Cassidy recalled. Since then, the region's capacity for commercial life science has slowly increased. "Over the past eight years we've built a very solid foundation, with a lot of breadth in supporting areas of science important to biotechnology," he said. That foundation already supports enough firms for the region to rank eighth in the most recent Ernst & Young survey. "That tells us that the strategy is working pretty well," Cassidy said. "Technology that can be commercialized is being developed, and companies are forming around those technologies." Like other emerging hubs, the Georgia group recognizes that it can't -- and shouldn't -- cover all phases of life science. "We realize that we need to specialize," Cassidy said. "About four years ago we hired the Battelle Institute to highlight areas of opportunity, and we chose six -- infectious disease and vaccine development; regenerative medicine; cardiological, neurological, and oncological diseases; and agricultural biotech -- all building on strengths developed here. We're now aiming to be recognized as best in class in those submarkets." Built-in advantages Memphis has a shorter history as a center for life science. "Up to about five years ago, most people in Memphis didn't think of it as a hub," Bares said. However, the city starts with several built-in advantages. "On the medical side, we are an international center for muscular orthopedics; we have a big industry base that's going through a dramatic change from nuts and bolts and titanium screws to growing new cartilage," Bares explained. "We have St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital -- a world-class institution in pediatric oncology -- and the University of Tennessee Medical School, with significant centers of excellence in ophthalmology, autoimmune diseases, pharmacology, and pharmacy. We also have a very large clinical base and a regional research Veterans Affairs hospital and a regional trauma center." The city is now creating infrastructure to attract new corporations. "We've started the process of setting up a research park on a downtown campus donated by Baptist Hospital," Bares said. "The 10-acre park will ultimately consist of 1.2 million square feet of laboratory, research, education, and business development space. And we're doing a fair amount of recruiting." The Kansas City region's destiny as a hub for life science started in 2000, when the Stowers Institute for Medical Research set up in the area. "They had decided to put about $2 million into the facility and to endow it with $1.6 billion (which has since grown to over $2 billion)," Duncan said. "Our idea was to look at other assets in the region and try to leverage them." Leveraging the assets Those assets included the University of Kansas, over the state line in nearby Lawrence; the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, KS; and the nonprofit Midwest Research Institute. "The idea was that if you build the research base, it will produce the intellectual property that you can transfer and commercialize to generate products and services that will improve the quality of life of people locally, regionally, nationally, and perhaps even globally," Duncan said. Duncan's organization also found significant strengths in animal health and nutrition. "Forty percent of the American animal health market is based in this region," Duncan said. "Having that research and production base here has led to opportunities to leverage. We are working on building public-private partnerships." That has helped to increase the region's research base from roughly $100 million in 2000 to more than $270 million last year. The process has also created start-up companies such as CritiTech and CyDex, based on internally developed intellectual property. "In the past five years there's been a pretty significant momentum change and awareness community-wide that this makes sense as a community initiative," Duncan said. Other regions have started to build on existing research foundations. The Pennington Biomedical Research Center has the goal of becoming the world's leading nutrition research center, thereby creating an economic engine for Baton Rouge, LA. Jacksonville, FL, bases its ambitions on a proton-beam cancer treatment facility at the University of Florida's Shands Cancer Center and the local branch of the Mayo Clinic. The Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse aims to nurture entrepreneurial bioscience in the steel city. And the state of Kentucky has developed a strategic plan to benefit from research and commerce in natural products, medical devices, health technology services, and niche pharmaceuticals and biotechnology products. Competition is fierce, but the emerging hubs offer life scientists new opportunities for advancement. |
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