By Jeff DeVuono – executive vice president and regional managing director, Brandywine Realty Trust, The Business Journals
With a growing number of startups and established companies wanting a presence in Philly, the city has buzz. Here’s what’s behind it.
Over the last several years, no life sciences market in America has had greater momentum than Philadelphia. As the birthplace of cell and gene therapy, the city is not only producing breakout companies — including Spark Therapeutics (owned by Roche) and Tmunity Therapeutics (recently acquired by Kite) — it’s also become a place where both new and established cell and gene therapy companies are eager to have a presence. What’s more, Philadelphia has been at the forefront of other recent life sciences breakthroughs, including Nobel Prize-winning advances in mRNA technology that led directly to the development of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines.
With such success stories, it’s little wonder that the city has been rising rapidly in rankings of life sciences clusters. In recent reports, Philadelphia finished ahead of markets such as New York and the Research Triangle in the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina while closing the gap on longtime leader Boston in several key categories. For new and established life sciences companies, Philadelphia is now an essential part of the conversation.
Depth of talent in Philadelphia
What’s driving all this vitality? At the top of the list is talent. The work done by cell and gene therapy pioneers Carl June, co-founder of Tmunity, and Katherine High, co-founder of Spark and former president of therapeutics at AskBio, is attracting other highly regarded researchers and spurring even greater innovation. As of 2022, Philadelphia-based cell and gene therapy scientists had been granted more than 300 patents, and they were leading more than 130 clinical trials for new cell and gene therapies, according to research from the economics firm Econsult Solutions Inc. Overall, Philadelphia has one of the highest concentrations of life sciences researchers in the country, with its numbers rising nearly 20% between 2017 and 2022.
That injection of talent is bolstered by several other factors that are important to growing life sciences companies. The pharmaceutical industry — including such titans as Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and GSK — has long had a major presence in the Greater Philadelphia region, providing a deep talent pool of experienced leaders for startups and existing companies. The region is also strong at the other end of the career spectrum: new graduates. Greater Philadelphia is home to four R1 research universities, and its 93 colleges and universities have been producing an increasing number of people ready for careers in science. According to Colliers, the region now ranks ahead of San Francisco, San Diego and Raleigh-Durham when it comes to producing next-generation talent.
Philadelphia’s arrow is also pointing up when it comes to biomanufacturing capacity. At the forefront of the phenomenon is Spark, whose headquarters is located within Schuylkill Yards, the development created by Brandywine Realty Trust and Drexel University in University City. Spark’s groundbreaking gene therapy treatment, Luxturna — used for a rare form of genetic blindness — was approved by the FDA in 2017, and the company (which is developing gene therapy treatments for other diseases, including hemophilia A and B and several central nervous system disorders) is now building a 500,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in University City, adjacent to its headquarters. The decision by Spark’s owner, Roche, to place the new facility there, just a short walk from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and other leading research institutions, is further enriching the life sciences ecosystem in University City and cementing the neighborhood as one of the world’s leading gene and cell therapy hubs. Meanwhile, manufacturing capacity is expanding quickly throughout the entire Greater Philadelphia region, with additional facilities opening everywhere from the Philadelphia Navy Yard to King Prussia.
An influx of funding for life sciences
Not surprisingly, all the recent advances and activity in Philadelphia have caught the attention of funders. The most significant statistic: Since 2018, Philadelphia is the number-one market in the country when it comes to NIH funding for cell and gene therapy, outpacing Boston, New York, Seattle and Los Angeles. When it comes to NIH grants more broadly, Philadelphia pulled in more than a billion dollars in support from the NIH in 2022 for thousands of projects, including work from Penn researchers on the design of universal vaccines against highly mutating viruses, bacteria and cancer, as well as work at the Wistar Institute that explores immunotherapy approaches to early-stage melanoma. And the awards are going to a mix of institutions: the region’s 10 most awarded organizations have seen annual funding grow by 4.2% on average, while smaller, emerging institutions are seeing 12.3% annual growth.*
Thanks to that kind of validation, as well as the continuing breakthroughs being produced in the lab, private investors are also seeing the city’s extraordinary potential. In 2022, venture capitalists poured $1.7 billion into Philadelphia life sciences firms, a nearly 400% increase over 2020. And despite the cooling of the overall venture capital market in the second half of 2022 and first quarter of 2023, opportunities for young companies remain robust.
The inflow of money reflects the confidence both public and private funders feel in work originating in Philadelphia, and with good reason: Penn, whose groundbreaking research led to the development of mRNA technology, now receives more than $1 billion annually from mRNA licensing agreements.
Full story: https://tinyurl.com/5n86xpkc
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.