Maryland has laid the foundations for a healthy biotechnology industry, according to a report by the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore being released today.
“The question is, what can we do to help” build on that foundation, said Brad McDearman, executive vice president of the alliance.
What the alliance found, according to the 40-page report, is that most successful bioscience markets are organically grown ? by capitalizing on existing resources such as the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University and the many federal agencies investing in bioscience research in this region.
Johns Hopkins was the top winner of National Institutes of Health grants, pulling in more than $607 million in 2005, according to the report. The Washington and Baltimore region ranked third nationwide, with $1.4 billion in awards, with more than half of that going to Baltimore companies and institutions.
Economic development gurus used to invest in luring big, established pharmaceutical companies to relocate to their regions, McDearman said. “But big pharma is not expanding; they?re not relocating into new markets.”
Instead, the investors are waiting for good ideas to prove themselves, then buying the businesses and providing an established pipeline to get their products to the market, he said.
Much of the news provided in this report was known, either intuitively or anecdotally, to those working in biosciences in the region, said Donald C. Fry, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Baltimore Committee ? an organization of business and civic leaders dedicated to promoting the region?s business market.
“It?s important to know what the state of our bioscience industry is at this time,” Fry said. “We?re truly becoming a significant hub in the biosciences community.”
By some estimates, he said, as much as 24 percent of the national product could come from this industry in the future, and Baltimore is ready to take advantage of that.
In its favor, Baltimore has low costs of doing business, ample real estate and an educated, available work force, the report states. It also benefits from being close to the federal dollars in Washington as well as within commuting distance of major markets in New York and Boston.
What the region lacks, according to McDearman, is localleadership and a clear strategy.
“We have a lot of economic development groups,” he said. “We need to make clear what we?re doing, even among each other.”
