Economist Profiles Biotech in NC: $1.2B Has Paid Off

Great piece on what North Carolina has accomplished. Of course, I like to remind folks that Charles Hamner, the key figure in this success story, is a Virginian! My congratulations to all our biotech friends in North Carolina for this great story.

North Carolina: Pipettes at the ready
Apr 16th 2009 | RALEIGH
From The Economist print edition

The state helps engineer a biotech boom

DURING a laboratory session at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, a dozen students gathered around a chromatography column. They were sending clarified lysate through an anion exchange, and some compared notes on the peculiar chemical smell of the classroom. “It’s like bad chicken noodle soup,” said one, wrinkling her nose.

Others explained how they had ended up in the protective goggles and booties. Wrennie Edwards said that she had started her career in textiles, but now she was “transitioning” to a livelier field. Megan Crum explained that, growing up in Greensboro, she always wanted to be a vet. But once she got to university she realised that everyone wanted to be one. There were, she thought, more opportunities in biomanufacturing. Her father, who used to work in tobacco, was enthusiastic.

Thirty years ago manufacturing in North Carolina meant textiles and furniture, and neither was doing well. The loss of those traditional industries was a blow. But North Carolina is finding a new course. The state has invested more than $1.2 billion in biotechnology in the past ten years, between facilities, research, training programmes and incentives for companies. Those efforts have paid off. North Carolina now has more than 54,000 people working for some 500 biotech companies. It is considered the third-largest biotechnology centre in the country, after California and Massachusetts. The aggregate economic impact, according to one report, is almost $46 billion a year.

It is no wonder that biotechnology companies like North Carolina. It has a high-powered university zone in the triangle formed by Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, home to North Carolina State, Duke University and the University of North Carolina respectively. This has helped attract over 170 companies to Research Triangle Park, right in the middle of things. And the state has reached out to industry. North Carolina’s community-college system runs courses that prepare students for entry-level technician jobs. It also offers short courses in specific skills, such as micropipetting.

North Carolina State’s Biomanufacturing Training and Education Centre, where the students were working with the chromatography column, is a more elaborate example of college-state-industry interaction. The gleaming building was paid for with $38m from the state’s 1998 settlement with tobacco companies. Operating costs are covered by the state, to the tune of $7m a year. “We look at ourselves, and I think the state does too, as an economic-development tool,” says Rick Lawless, the associate director of the centre. Biotech has its struggles at the moment; companies are worried about investment in the current climate. But North Carolina’s love affair with its new industry will survive.