Beyond RTP: How North Carolina Built an End-to-End Life Sciences Ecosystem

So all of these ecosystem episodes are the same.

We talk about four major things.

The first is the anatomy of a hub.

What is it about the hub that makes it tick? What makes it different than all of the other hubs that exist? We talk about capital and commercialization.

As people like to say, capital is local, but we're learning that it's not quite as true, but there are some local aspects to it.

So we'll talk about what makes things work here and how that looks.

We talk about infrastructure in place, what's currently in place, what's needed to be in place, how are things changing to really support the launch of these new ventures.

And then lastly, we talk about talent, community building and partnerships, kind of those intangible things that make the community excited about science and continue to motivate companies to come into a new place.

So why don't we just jump in right at the beginning and let's talk about the anatomy of the hub.

I like to say that RTP is a pretty successful hub, about 40 years old, right? So it's one of the older hubs in the United States, on par with Boston, on par with San Diego.

But what's made North Carolina successful? I've talked with Boston.

I've talked with San Diego.

They talk about what's made them successful.

A lot of it is place and where they are.

What made

North Carolina successful? Yeah, so I think when you think about a life sciences hub, it has some critical ingredients.

And when you think about those elements, research depth is certainly one of the most important ones.

Translational capacity, can you take those innovations and move them towards the marketplace? Do you have the right infrastructure, like you mentioned, workforce capacity? Together, this all leads to an industry density, and if you have the capital to help continue to push that growth forward, then I think the industry is going to arrive to a place where that hub can resist any pressure and it starts to be self-sustaining and can continue to grow from there.

I think that's really a measure of has a hub arrived is whether or not it has that flywheel effect where it feeds itself.

I think that's where in North Carolina we have quite a unique setup in that we have strength across all the segments of the biopharma value chain from academic research to biotech R&D companies, clinical trial execution, all the way up to biomanufacturing, manufacturing and sales.

And so from that perspective, that builds North Carolina as a really resilient ecosystem that can adapt and change as you have changes in the marketplace.

And I think that's really important for a hub and where North Carolina has a lot of strength.

Yeah, I

would agree.

I think for thinking about that diversification and all of the pieces and parts that go into a hub having a champion having somebody who is driving these initiatives forward so in 1984 the state legislature in north carolina formed the north carolina biotechnology center and so having this organization kind of touching all different parts of the industry from the university researchers who are doing that that innovative kind of first look at what could be the next therapeutic to those emerging companies that are coming out of the universities or that are starting organically because of some of the things and infrastructure that we have here, all the way moving to the companies that I'm working with who are on that larger side, who are bringing in these large facilities, these large manufacturing facilities to bolster up the entire ecosystem, that has a lot of flywheel effects with universities, workforce, talent, those types of training programs that really is kind of a self-feeding loop at that point.