Surprise! The Life Sciences Exists all over the Southern Map

By Mike Randle

If you regularly read national or international life science trade publications, no doubt you would come to the conclusion that biotech doesn't exist anywhere in the South but in North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Maryland. Sure, the Scripps Research Institute's huge, new controversial project in South Florida has garnered plenty of ink throughout the world. But since almost all major biotech trade publications and Web sites are located outside the South -- specifically in California – little attention is paid to the region’s bio growth.

The fact that much of the South's life science industry is not well known to scientists, entrepreneurs and large biotech concerns located outside the region is why BioIndustrySouth.com was launched. That and the belief we hold that this region will outperform all others in job and investment generation in the bio industry in the near future.

If you believe that last statement is way off base consider this: the market that is the American South comprises 114 million people and is home to double the amount of baby boomers than any other U.S. region. Fact is, the South almost doubles the two traditional biotech regions in size. The Northeast market totals 60 million people and the West now is home to 68 million. Do you really think that life sciences companies would not follow the people and the money? Do you really think that the biotech industry has ignored the largest market in the largest consumer nation in the world? If you read the trade publications you might be led to believe they have. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

Yep, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Maryland are significant world players in the bio industry. But so are most Southern states. It's impossible to name all of the growing life science communities in the South, but here are a few notable items you may have missed in the national life science trade publications (you can read more about these facts by going to the Preferred Southern Sites column on the main page).

* The University of Alabama at Birmingham received more funding from the National Institutes of Health in fiscal year 2004 ($243 million) than did the famous Scripps Research Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

* Currently (fall 2005) about $1.8 billion (that's with a "B") worth of infrastructure for the life sciences is underway in Memphis, Tenn.

* Over $1 billion in life sciences infrastructure has been completed or announced in the last year in the Kansas City metro.

* Medical device manufacturers are building new facilities throughout the region. But it should be noted that many of those plants are located in the rural South.

* Exactly one-third of the colleges and universities in the United States given awards by the National Institutes of Health in fiscal year 2004 (170 of 532) were located in the South. Universities in the South that made NIH's top 100 in the U.S. were:

1. Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore)
2. Washington University (St. Louis)
3. Duke University (Durham)
4. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill)
5. Vanderbilt University (Nashville)
6. Baylor College of Medicine (Houston)
7. University of Alabama at Birmingham (Birmingham)
8. Emory University (Atlanta)
9. University of Texas SW Medical Center Dallas (Dallas)
10. University of Maryland Baltimore (Baltimore)
11. University of Virginia (Charlottesville)
12. University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston)
13. Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem)
14. University of Florida (Gainesville)
15. University of Texas Medical (Galveston)
16. University of Miami (Coral Gables)
17. University of Texas Health Science Center (San Antonio)
18. University of Kentucky (Lexington)
19. Medical University of South Carolina (Charleston)
20. University of Texas Health Science Center (Houston)
21. Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond)
22. Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.)
23. Tulane University (New Orleans)
24. University of Kansas (Lawrence)
25. George Washington University (Washington, D.C.)
26. University of Arkansas (Fayetteville)
27. University of Texas Austin (Austin)
28. University of Louisville (Louisville)
29. University of Oklahoma (Norman)
30. University of Tennessee Health Science Center (Memphis)
31. University of Missouri (Columbia)
32. University of South Florida (Tampa)
33. Medical College of Georgia (Augusta)
34. Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge)
35. University of Georgia (Athens)

* San Diego-based Scripps Research Institute announced it will locate a huge campus in Palm Beach County, Fla. The development was projected to create up to 40,000 new jobs in South Florida. Environmentalists have sued to stop the construction of the research center, which will be located adjacent to the fragile Florida Everglades. However, in the spring 2005 quarter, government leaders in Palm Beach County voted to begin construction on the Scripps site called Mecca Farms.

* Maryland's Johns Hopkins University has been the No. 1 funded life sciences center in the U.S. for more than two decades now. In 2003, the university became the first ever to pass the $1 billion mark for research funding in one year.

* Hundreds of millions or dollars of tobacco settlement money forwarded to Southern states is being used to improve the regions' attractiveness to companies in the life sciences.

* Houston is home to the world’s largest medical complex with 40 healthcare organizations including Baylor College of Medicine, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, which operates the Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases.

* In northern Virginia, a $500 million Janelia Farm Research Campus is being built by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The complex is scheduled for a 2006 completion and will house 300 scientists who will conduct biomedical research.

* UT Medical Branch in Galveston won a $120 million award for a National Biocontainment Laboratory, one of two in the entire nation.

* Legislation has passed in Missouri that allocates 25 percent of the overall tobacco settlement funds (approximately $36 million per year from 2007 through 2025) into a Life Sciences Trust Fund. A full 80 percent of these funds will be used to build research capacity, while the remaining 20 percent will go to bio-related technology transfer and commercialization activities.

* Products that were developed in part with support from Maryland’s Industrial Partnerships Program, which provides matching funds for university-based research projects that help companies develop new products, include MedImmune’s $1.6 billion Synagis, which prevents a respiratory disease in infants and Martek Biosciences additive for infant formulas, which helped the company generate $114 million in revenue in 2003.

* In Georgia, the Bioexpression and Fermentation Facility (BFF) at the University of Georgia is a molecular biology, protein, and biomass production core facility offering contract services (including confidential contract research) and training to academia and private industry. BFF provides state-of-the-art instrumentation and expertise to accelerate the process from gene identification through recombinant protein production and purification to process development, scale-up, and manufacturing.

* The Biotechnology Program of the University of Maryland’s Technology Enterprise Institute (MTECH) links biotechnology business with University of Maryland researchers and provides ongoing technical assistance to these companies in their R&D efforts for product scale-up. The Program includes a Bioprocess Scale-up Facility that offers services in fermentation, separation, purification, and product analysis to companies.

* Louisiana is encouraging collaboration between universities within the bioscience arena. The state provides $5 million to $10 million annually to the Louisiana Gene Therapy Research Consortium, which includes Louisiana State University Health Science Centers in New Orleans and Shreveport and the Tulane University Health Science Center. Since 2000 when the Consortium was established, 24 researchers have been assembled who are being supported by $36 million in research funding.

* One of five Kansas Centers of Excellence is the Higuchi Biosciences Center at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. This initiative includes the Center for Bioanalytical Research, a Center for Drug Delivery Research, and a Center for Neurobiology and Immunology Research.

* Virginia ranks 12 th in terms of venture capital investment. Also, Virginia is among the top 10 states for venture dollars invested and the top 15 fastest growing states for venture capital investment.

* In Research Triangle Park, biotech companies are the biggest sector grabbing venture capital. This has been a growing trend every year since 1999 when 11.4 percent of the capital deployed went into the biotech sector. That figure is now hovering around 30 percent.