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Cluster of biotech businesses in Colorado should grow naturally

Having this powerhouse, research-oriented university is a wonderful asset for the state. Plus, having an infrastructure in the state that has supported technology for a number of years – be it information technology, telecom or life science technology – means there are wonderful opportunities.

While we have a young biotech industry in Colorado, every month it absorbs many more people than are in this room into jobs.

It’s not just Ph.D.s in white lab coats peering into petri dishes. A biotech company needs to have the whole management structure.

Of 18 for-profit biotech companies we’re already housing at the Bioscience Park at Fitzsimons, probably a third of them are scientists with doctorates. The balance is a whole range of talent.

People experienced in information technology companies may have wonderful opportunities today and tomorrow in Colorado in biotech.

As the industry matures in Colorado, it will still be research-oriented. Biotech is the most research-oriented industry. The statistic: $90,000 a year per employee goes into R&D in the biotech industry. But as it moves into manufacturing, there will be a need for process engineers and a whole slew of other areas of talent.

As the life science industry grows in Colorado, it will need to have a whole specialized infrastructure of service providers. My job is heading the organization that’s redeveloping Fitzsimons, the largest medical-related redevelopment project in the nation and the first university-related research park focused on life science technologies to be launched west of the Mississippi.

We are building specialized research and development facilities that are right across the street from the truly impressive development that CU is doing at Fitzsimons, which is putting the clinical patient care, teaching and research compactly on the site.

It’s so important that biotech has an opportunity to grow out of academic labs. Biotech is the first industry in the U.S. that really has come out of labs of academic medical centers.

A lot of what we hope for in Colorado is to bring business talent together with scientific prowess that’s here in the state already, and really build the industry.

At Fitzsimons, the whole Army hospital site dwindled down to about 20 people in 1998 and 1999.

We have about $800 million of construction on the site either under way or completed – with about 2,800 people now working on site. By the end of 2004, we’ll have 5,000 because of the construction.

By the end of this decade, we will have 15,000 working on the site and on half of the square- mile Life Sciences City, about 7 million square feet.

The schedule for the build-out beyond 2010 is speculative. But when it’s completed, we’ll end up with 32,000 people working on the site. That has been compared to the direct employment in the Colorado ski industry, which was 30,000 in 1999.

A lot of people tend to think, well, let’s get on a plane and go get that biotech industry and bring it here. And maybe there really will be such opportunities in time.

But important clusters today of biotech in the U.S. have all essentially grown their own.

Other clusters of biotech have expanded as universities spin the science off campus and commercialize it, keeping the businesses in the same city or state. And then those ventures grow.

And that’s the way we can assure that biotech in Colorado will flourish.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/business_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_82_1578241,00.html

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Colorado is joining the top tier of biotech-savvy states

The state has been driven in recent years by four main industries. One is information technology and the communications industry. Second is aerospace. Third is tourism. And then energy, with oil and gas.

We would like to think that biotechnology – medical research, ag-bio research – is going to emerge as a fifth major economic driver in the state.

There’s tremendous infrastructure in Colorado that supports the biotechnology industry. One of the drivers has been the federal doubling of the budget for the National Institutes of Health, which in the last five years has gone from $13 billion to $27 billion. The nice thing for Coloradans is that, even though we’re 24th in population, the state is 15th in NIH support. This is biomedical research. We feel we’re getting more than the lion’s share of the prize, and that the intellectual capacity of this state far outstrips the population.

If you look at the institutions in the state that generate research dollars, most of those dollars come from the federal government.

It approaches close to $700 million a year. We’re talking about the University of Colorado and its satellite campuses, Colorado State University in Fort Collins; the Colorado School of Mines; and many of the affiliate organizations like the National Jewish Research Center.

The budget of the CU Health Sciences Center is $1 billion a year. About $75 million of that is state funds. About $300 million is research dollars, most of which are federal dollars.

The rest is clinical money and other kinds of revenue. The state money is 8 percent of the total. So as a Coloradan, for every dollar of taxpayer money you pay that goes to the Health Sciences Center, we generate $11 – an incredible bargain for the state.

Industry wants to co-locate with the brainpower. Here in Colorado, we have a great opportunity to bring industry to this state and to grow the industry here to higher levels.

An important piece of the puzzle is the $4.3 billion Fitzsimons redevelopment project. For those of you who are not familiar with this, 160 acres of the decommissioned Fitzsimons Army Medical Center is being converted into a research park. University of Colorado’s hospitals, professional schools and research institutes, as well as Children’s Hospital, will be relocated there.

On the capital side, the Health Sciences Center and the University of Colorado Hospital and Children’s Hospital, taken together, require about $1.7 billion in construction. In fund-raising, we’ve passed the $700 million amount. Of the $700 million, $34 million is state money. Again, incredible leverage.

We’re now topping $50 million in federal target appropriations for the Fitzsimons project. That spurred the state to match with $34 million, and then of course we’ve had enormous success with philanthropy, with the Phil Anschutz Foundation. They’re putting in $55 million.

One of the nice things about the doubling of the NIH budget is that Colorado – and particularly Fitzsimons – has been seen as an example of how the NIH is expressing itself at the local level. As a matter of fact, Elias Zerhouni, the NIH director, will be visiting us Feb. 13 to tout Fitzsimons as a national example.

The CU medical school faculty is rated the fifth-most productive in the country out of 125 schools.

And you’ve got to remember, the roof is leaking, refrigerators are out in the hall – don’t tell the fire marshal – so we’re very optimistic that when you put these people into new, shiny, state- of-the art facilities at Fitzsimons, they’re going to do really well.

Research out of the CU medical school has tripled in the last 15 years

There are 125 academic health centers in the country, and CU currently ranks 19th or 20th, depending on how you count it. This Fitzsimons project will put us in the top 10.

That’s important. If a company wants to relocate, we want CU to be in the same breath as Johns Hopkins, Duke, UCSF, UCLA, etc. Companies want to associate with the top-tier institutions.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/business_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_82_1578244,00.html

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