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Let’s hurry to grab a piece of the biotech economic pie
Quick Notes: Trends & Talk About Town
By Dennis Quick
At the recent Southeastern Bio Investor Forum held at Charleston Place hotel, 16 young companies from the Southeast presented themselves to potential investors. Only one of those startups—Argolyn Bioscience Inc. in North Charleston—hailed from South Carolina.
That’s nothing to cheer about, but we shouldn’t feel too badly. Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland and Georgia joined us in the one-presenter club, while Mississippi and Kentucky didn’t even show.
Florida fielded three startups. The other seven came from North Carolina.
That the Tar Heel state had the lion’s share of representatives should come as no surprise. After all, the air in North Carolina must be clearer than elsewhere in the South to allow Tar Heels to see the future.
Back in the 1950s, when cotton and tobacco still largely fueled the South’s rickety economy, North Carolinians began planning the Triangle Research Park. They got together the state’s best academic brains from Duke University, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, united those folks with business and industrial leaders and began the blueprint for an economic pathway into the 21st century.
In 1959, the 7,000-acre research park between Durham, N.C., Raleigh, N.C., and Chapel Hill, N.C., arrived. One by one, research and development companies located there. Steadily, a science and engineering infrastructure emerged.
The arrival in 1965 of IBM and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences blew the park’s doors wide open, igniting an influx of research companies. Today the Triangle Research Park is home to more than 130 research and development companies.
The park gives North Carolina a superb advantage over the rest of the South (and over a good many other areas of the United States) in the worldwide quest toward a life-sciences economy.
From Asia to Europe to North America, word is that life sciences will soon be an economy’s lucrative meat and potatoes.
Will South Carolina have a bite of that feast? We’re just around the corner from 2006, and we have nothing resembling a Triangle Research Park we can stand on to help us reach the table, let alone help ourselves to a life-sciences serving.
We don’t have an M.I.T. or a Harvard, either. Yet apparently those two prestigious institutions aren’t enough to guarantee Massachusetts a place—at least a dominant one—at the life-sciences table.
In 2003, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council held a symposium, “MassBiotech 2010: Achieving Global Leadership in the Life-Sciences Economy,” urging its state government and the state’s life-sciences community—something we barely have—to get their life-sciences act together.
The Massachusetts symposium recommended that the state 1) “become a champion of and a catalyst for biotech economic development;” 2) improve its business climate; 3) plan an infrastructure for the next generation of biotech development; and 4) prepare a workforce.
Sound familiar?
Knowledge-based industry proponents have told us time and again we South Carolinians need to get started on those very things. Massachusetts is way ahead of us in each of those departments, and they still have to do more.
There’s no doubt South Carolina is up against a wall when it comes to competing with the rest of the world for a hefty slice of that life-sciences pie.
But the task, although a daunting one, isn’t hopeless.
As I mentioned in my Dec. 12 column, William Harris, director of Science Foundation Ireland and keynote speaker last month at the University of South Carolina’s 25th Annual Economic Outlook Conference, pointed out that if Ireland can transform itself from a science nonentity to a major life-sciences player, so can we.
We’ve got a renowned medical university and something Ireland doesn’t have—a warm and sunny climate.
Obviously, MUSC is the nucleus of our yet-to-be-born life-sciences economy. The second is the sexy recruiting tool to lure biotech companies from places like Buffalo, N.Y., which has more than
125 life-sciences companies in its snowy domain. Surely we can entice a couple of those companies out of the cold.
In fact, I suggest we get cold blooded and make direct pitches to certain companies freezing their test tubes off in the snow.
By “certain companies,” I mean those that play into our biotech strengths—pharmaceuticals (Aroglyn’s and the recently arrived Apogee Biotechnology Corp.’s forte) and tissue engineering (in 2003, MUSC’s Shared Tissue Engineering Laboratory collaborated with Clemson University to convert an inkjet printer into a tissue-cells printer).
We’re not going to get the bulk of that aforementioned life-sciences pie. But if we get moving, get predatory and start building lab facilities, we can get some pretty decent slices.
Dennis Quick is senior staff writer at the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.
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