Floridas $1.6 billioninvestment in bioscience is yielding high returns, according to two reports published by the industry and presented at its annual conference in June.
Biotechnology (or biotech) is the use of living organisms in the development of useful products, most commonly in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and in the development of agriculture.
The reports findings are being hailed as a vindication of the policies of former Gov. Jeb Bush, who from 2003 made the burgeoning of the biotech industry in the Sunshine State one of his legislative and executive priorities. That year, the Florida Legislature appropriated 300 million in federal stimulus dollars to lure the California-based Scripps Research Institute to Jupiter, and since 2006 has directed hundreds more millions (with matching contributions from local governments) to other institutes.
But these expenditures or what some refer to as investments are not without their critics.
How many low-income children could have had health insurance or students could have received tuition assistance? U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, grilled Bush at a U.S. House Budget Committee in June.
There are always people who believe there are other things that you should invest in, beyond recruiting business and industry and spending money in that regard, says Frank Brogan, onetime lieutenant governor under Bush and presently chancellor of the State University System of Florida, in an interview with Sunshine State News. If you look at it as an expenditure, thats understandable. But I dont. We looked at it as an investment: making Florida an attractive place for these companies to expand their operations. At the same time, there was a very specific covenant created ... as to what exactly the expectation would be on a return from that investment.
One of the June reports, titled Florida's BioPulse: A Snapshot of the Bioscience Industry, was published by the University of Florida (UF), and it details just some of the purported returns:
- The industry has grown by 42 percent over the past five years, bringing the total to nearly 200 biotechnology companies. [T]he U.S. biotechnology sector has shown a much slower growth rate of less than 5 percent over the same period.
- More than 10 percent of the nations biotechnology companies now reside in Florida.
- Approximately two-thirds of Florida companies currently have a product being sold in the marketplace.
- There are 43 publicly held companies, the majority of which are traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the over-the-counter(OTC) exchanges.
- [I]nvestment dollars in 2011 surged 200 percent over 2010 levels to nearly $87 million, while life science venture funding nationwide, which includes both the biotechnology and medical device segments, increased just 21 percent during the past year.
The other report, published by the Battelle Memorial Institute and the Biotechnology Industry Organization, highlighted still more findings:
- From 2001 to 2010 state biotech establishments grew by about 33 percent and job growth increased almost 19 percent; nationally, the industry experienced an establishment increase of about 13 percent and job growth of about 6 percent.
- The Florida drugs and pharmaceuticals sector shows the largest growth among the top 10 bioscience employment states.
- The biotech sector grew over 30 percent in companies during 2001-2010 while Florida's overall private-sector employment shrank by almost 2 percent.
I think the future of biotech in our state is full of enormous potential, says Brogan. We have barely scratched the surface.
David Day, director of UF's Office of Technology Licensing and of the universitys Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator, agrees. Our future is good. We are going to be one of the more significant industries in Florida and Florida will be home to one of the more significant biotech clusters in the world, he predicts. We wont be the top, nor even the second, but certainly one of the top dozen in the world. But it will take time and continued investment.
Day tells Sunshine State News that the Sid Incubator (and others like it) fill a needed gap between biological research and the application of that research in the development of lifesaving and pain-relieving products. Biotech incubators rent out laboratories (including state-of-the-art shared scientific equipment) to several start-up companies who are otherwise unable to raise the approximately $1 billion needed to develop a new product and get it into the hands of consumers.
While there is no set timeline, Day estimates that the companies which start out at Sid take between five and 10 years, on average, before they graduate from the incubator and are able to function at their own privately owned facilities.
One such company is AxoGen Inc., a Sid graduate which has developed a successful nerve regeneration product which surgically grafts nerve-bundles within gaps created where nerves have been severed by severe trauma.
And Day says theres more coming down the pike.
Ultimately, what youre going to see is cures to diseases. We just launched a new pancreatic cancer company, seeking a cure for pancreatic cancer, he says. We have a company that got launched out of Scripps that is attacking the blindness that comes from diabetes; we have a gene therapy company from out here in Gainesville that is also tackling that. Cancer, heart diseases, diabetes, traumatic brain injury, and a lot of work on all things related to ageing.
Days devotion to the biotechnology industry, and faith in its future possibilities, is nothing short of eschatological. For me, sitting at this crossroads between these very bright and inspired scientists and these industries trying to provide these products and services to people and make a bunch of bucks at the same time -- is just amazing. It looks almost like miracles in the works.
Reach Eric Giunta at egiunta@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.
