Cambridge/Boston life sciences cluster receives $1B boost

Growing an Innovation Cluster Part 1: As the European Commission prepares to release its first comprehensive policy on nurturing innovation clusters, Science|Business begins a series looking at where the most successful clusters get their edge.

With life sciences clusters now spotlighted as a key driver of innovation and economic growth by governments worldwide, one of the oldest and most successful clusters in the world – the Cambridge/Boston area of Massachusetts – is taking steps to buttress its leadership role.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick on June 16 signed a 10-year, $1 billion Life Sciences Initiative (LSI) aimed at securing the state’s position as a global leader in life sciences. The money is part of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Law, which among other things aims to fill gaps in federal funding of early stage research to help get innovations from idea to product. The law also includes tax incentives and infrastructure-building. Almost as importantly, it is expected to spur advances in novel areas of discovery such as stem cells and RNA interference (RNAi).

“There is no place in the world with as great a concentration of life sciences talent, resources and vision as Massachusetts,” Governor Patrick said on signing the new legislation. “With these resources—and the collaboration and support of the industry, academia, business and government—we are on our way to helping find new cures for diseases, creating new jobs and positioning ourselves for long-term economic growth.”

To emphasise the importance of the law, Governor Patrick flew immediately to San Diego, California, to push the plan at the BIO 2008 International Convention.

The Massachusetts legislation includes $250 million in tax incentives for companies, $250 million in grants and $500 million for infrastructure, most notably for the public university system. The LSI calls for, among other things, the construction of a facility at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center dedicated to the RNAi research pioneered by the university’s Nobel laureate, Craig Mello. The funding also will create what is hoped to become the world’s foremost stem cell bank.

“…we are confident [the LSI] will lead directly to a stronger economy and better health care,” John Heffernan, the vice president of policy and external affairs for the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MBC), a business organisation, said at the LSI’s signing.

Sowing the seeds of innovation

These are 21st century measures to maintain the region’s pre-eminence. What may be depressing for would be imitators is that the seeds of the Boston/Cambridge life sciences cluster were sown as long ago as 1640 when Harvard University was founded. The birth of MIT in 1865 is also significant, according to a report, “2008 Massachusetts Super Cluster 2”, by the consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers released a few days before the LSI was signed.

These institutions form the two key centres of the cluster, Kendall Square in Cambridge and the Longwood Medical Area (LMA) surrounding Harvard Medical School in Boston. The two are within a few miles of each other, and each area is home to institutions that claim to have made some of the oldest and some of the most recent major medical discoveries. The LMA has more than a dozen cutting-edge life sciences organisations, including several that are ranked among the top five in the US in their fields.

Kendall Square, now home to dozens of laboratories, started as a life sciences hub when MIT moved its campus there in 1915, according to the report.

After molecular biology breakthroughs in the 1940s and 1950s, MIT converted a factory into Technology Square in the 1960s. In the ensuing decades Genzyme Corp. and other biotechnology companies flocked to the area, as did US and international pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis, drawn to its research capabilities and possibilities for collaborations. Today, the report says, there are more than 150 life sciences companies around Kendall Square.

Boston/Cambridge has all the ingredients for a successful cluster: teaching hospitals, research universities, trained workers, financiers and entrepreneurs, all within that few-mile stroll from one side of the Charles River to the other.

“The Cambridge cluster is sought after internationally,” said Gerry McDougall, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers Health Sciences Advisory in Boston. It is both a place to come and study or work and an environment to try to replicate overseas because of its breadth (see Recipes for the cluster stew, April 24 Science Business). “It goes from bench all the way to the bedside,” he said of the Boston/Cambridge life sciences cluster. “It’s well positioned today and tomorrow.”

Easy collaboration

While the PricewaterhouseCoopers report says the Massachusetts life sciences "Super Cluster" continues to change the face of medicine by driving research innovation, it is facing increasing competition for talent and funding from other states and countries.

The Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives organisation has estimated the life sciences sector contributes about $8.8 billion annually to the Massachusetts economy. Behind the related industries of healthcare and education, the life sciences industry is a powerful driver of job growth in Massachusetts, directly employing 77,247 people, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ analysis.

Its workforce grew eight percent in the five-year period between 2001 and 2006, compared to the entire Massachusetts workforce, which contracted by 2.5 per cent in the same period.

While the PricewaterhouseCoopers report highlights the region's strength, it also says there are signs that industry and government may need to work harder to protect the pipeline of innovation and assure Massachusetts’ long-term success in life sciences.

For example, Massachusetts receives more funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on a per capita basis than any other state, but NIH grants to Massachusetts researchers declined for the first time in 2006, and in 2007 were at their lowest level in three years. Nationally, NIH funding has not kept pace with inflation for the past five years, and if this trend continues, the report states, it could hit particularly hard in Massachusetts, whose young researchers have served as a wellspring of ideas and products for the rest of the industry.

The Super Cluster report also raised some concerns about whether Massachusetts companies will be able to continue to mine its strengths in research and commercialise the ideas coming out of the state’s laboratories.