A much better approach, and one I’ve been advocating for years, is to duplicate the Irish model of focusing on drug manufacturing to build the core “base” of stable biotech/healthcare infrastructure in the area. The range of jobs in drug manufacturing covers a much broader educational background, making government investment in the area more palatable.

As medicine becomes more personalized, there will be a boom in manufacturing to handle all the different kinds of medications. While the number of cells and pills produced may not increase much, the number of manufacturing lines and bioreactors necessary to produce an exponentially larger array of these drugs will. I believe the resulting smaller, more nimble, and more tech-heavy manufacturing lines are a perfect fit for our area’s geography and base of technical experts.

It also happens to be a far more stable business than drug development, which will almost always see dislocations due to acquisition in the case of success, or layoffs in the case of failures.