[Update, 12:05 p.m., 10/23/09: The time for President Obama's speech has been pushed back to 12:25 p.m., according to the White House. It appears that MIT's video servers are being overwhelmed by traffic; if you want to watch the speech online, we recommend trying the White House's own live video stream.]

When Air Force One touches down at Logan Airport at 11:30 a.m. today, there will already be a small crowd of students, faculty members, and local technology leaders waiting inside MIT’s Kresge Auditorium for President Barack Obama to arrive.

In his noontime speech at Kresge, announced just three days ago, Mr. Obama is expected to call for stronger U.S. leadership on clean energy research and press for passage of the Senate energy bill, S. 1733, co-sponsored by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and California Senator Barbara Boxer.

Invitations to the MIT speech are the most coveted tickets in town today. While Kresge seats some 1,300 people, only about 60 students and 40 faculty members have been invited, according to estimates by The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper. The White House has also issued invitations to a hand-picked group of local leaders in energy entrepreneurship and investing.

The President will meet briefly before the speech with a select group of MIT energy researchers, according to the MIT News Office.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick will be on stage with the President, who is expected to attend a campaign fundraising luncheon for the governor at the Westin Copley Hotel in Boston before returning to Washington. In a video published on his campaign website this week, Governor Patrick said, “In many ways our agenda here in Massachusetts is very closely aligned with the agenda of the Obama Administration.” He included a reference to “our work to expand innovation industries that will create the opportunities for tomorrow, like IT and clean energy and biotech.”

If you weren’t one of the lucky few who won an invitation to attend the President’s speech in person, here are a few ways you can follow his visit:

—MIT will share a live webcast of the speech at http://amps-web.mit.edu/public/amps/webcast/2009/obama-2009oct23/

—The White House will also offer a live video stream at http://www.whitehouse.gov/live/, and CNN says it will stream the event live.

—If you can make it to Cambridge, MIT will be showing a closed-circuit broadcast of the speech in various rooms around campus (4-237, 1-190, 26-100, 32-141, 32-155, and E51-315) as well as the MIT Museum.

—Xconomy has recruited a posse of local students, investors, and technology leaders who scored tickets to the speech to write to us with their impressions of the event, and we’ll be compiling their contributions in a post early this afternoon.

—Organizers of the Fifth Conference on Clean Energy, to be held in Boston November 12-13, will be sharing real-time posts about the speech on Twitter using the hash tag #CCE-2009.

—Finally, MIT will post a recording of the speech late this afternoon on its video portal site, MIT World.

According to the MIT News Office, today’s visit marks only the second time a sitting U.S. president has visited MIT. President Bill Clinton was MIT’s commencement speaker in 1998.

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Back in August, Connect CEO Duane Roth outlined an initiative to address a dearth of venture capital investment by seeking to develop alternative funding sources for San Diego’s early-stage technology companies. A key part of the non-profit group’s initiative is to pursue additional federal support—and now that effort is facing its first major test as Congress takes up a bill that would provide funding through the Small Business Administration for equity investments in certain types of technology startups.

A House bill dubbed “The Small Business Early Stage Investment Act of 2009” would basically make the federal government a limited partner in qualified investment firms that make venture capital investments in early-stage companies in targeted industries. Roth tells me the bill, which was introduced by Democratic Rep. Glenn Nye of Virginia, fits his initiative “perfectly.”

Roth says he also helped recruit Martin Sabarsky, the San Diego-based chief operating officer for biofuels startup HR BioPetroleum, to testify yesterday before the House Small Business Committee in support of the bill. Roth describes HR BioPetroleum as an ideal case study that explains why federal funding is needed to boost venture investing. The company, which has offices in Hawaii and San Diego, saw its plans to build a commercial algae facility on Maui indefinitely postponed in September 2008, when financing for the project collapsed amid the free fall on Wall Street.

“Our subsequent attempts to attract additional venture capital/private equity investment to continue development in the midst of the continuing financial crisis have thus far failed,” Sabarsky said in his prepared testimony, which was submitted on behalf of BIO, the Biotechnology Industry Organization. BIO contends in a recent statement that venture investors have become especially risk averse when it comes to providing capital to small, early-stage biotechs and biofuels startups.

“Even in more ‘normal’ financial times, the private equity and capital markets have increasingly failed to fund promising, early stage scientific research beyond the basic research stage and before the revenue-generation stage,” Sabarsky said in his testimony.

The bill that Sabarsky, BIO, and Connect are supporting is H.R. 3738, which was introduced last week, and would amend the Small Business Investment Act of 1958 to provide funding for investments in technology startups in eight targeted industries: energy; environmental; life sciences, information technology; digital media; cleantech; and defense. The measure authorizes $250 million in federal funding for the first fiscal year after enactment, but Roth says sponsors want to provide $3 billion to $5 billion for venture investments over a five-year period.

To get federal funding, a participating investment firm must make all of its investments in small businesses, with at least half in early-stage small businesses in the eight targeted industries.

Connect’s Roth says the Early Stage Investment Act would also reinstate the federal government’s Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) program, which provided federal funding to certain venture funds.

Roth says firms that participated in the SBIC program in the 1990s incurred huge losses when the dot-com crash hit, and the federal government was forced to write off much of its funding. “The Bush Administration got nervous and stopped funding the program in 2004,” Roth says. “So now the Obama Administration is trying to revisit this with lots” of federal stimulus funding.

Roth, who was back in Washington, D.C., last week when the bill was marked up, says he’s “guardedly optimistic” about the measure’s prospects. So far, the bill seems to have bipartisan support, and Roth says there’s no indication that anyone intends to oppose the measure.

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In an informal discussion with technology leaders from industry and academia this morning at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and staff members from her office covered a range of issues affecting technology businesses and consumers, from cybercrime to the need to overhaul the state’s laws regarding noncompete agreements. Overregulation and outdated regulations were a major theme, with Coakley acknowledging in jest that “we love statutes and regulations in Massachusetts” and saying that in a time of severe budgetary constraints, changing and updating the law is one thing the state government can do to help businesses and entrepreneurs.

The meeting, the first of its kind between representatives of the technology community and the state’s top law enforcement officer, was intended to start a discussion about what sorts of changes to put on the agenda. “We can’t make decisions in the abstract,” Coakley told the gathering of about 30 people from Massachusetts companies and universities. “In a variety of areas where we’ve approached these issues—what technology means for government, for public safety, for privacy—part of what I want to do is get some feedback from you. What are we doing and not doing, and how can we be more helpful?”

Coakley poked a bit of fun at herself, confessing that as late as the mid-1990s, when she was chief of the Child Abuse Prosecution Unit of the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, she did not know how to turn on her computer to retrieve her e-mail. But after she became DA herself, she said, she got a crash course in computers and the Internet during the prosecution of Michael McDermott, who killed seven colleagues at Edgewater Technology in December 2000 and was convicted of murder after it was revealed that he had used Google to search for information on how to fake mental illness. As Massachusetts attorney general, she led settlement negotiations with Framingham, MA-based TJX to resolve claims around its massive data breach in 2007, and to make sure adequate safeguards are in place to protect consumer data in the future.

“I really like being attorney general, somewhat to my surprise,” Coakley said, “because it’s a great opportunity to learn about a whole range of issues, like where we should be going and how we can help businesses do well in Massachusetts, and how to protect consumers and protect the environment.”

The first issue raised by technology community members was whether Massachusetts should be doing more to make sure that some federal stimulus money reaches small businesses, rather than going exclusively to large corporations and public works projects. “From where I sit it’s been very disappointing to see the [slow] pace of the stimulus money and to see how restricted it is,” Coakley responded. “My focus on the stimulus money is to make sure it goes where it should” and to see that distribution of the funds isn’t mired in paperwork and graft. “It’s an example of big government trying to do big things and not necessarily being effective,” she said, but added, “I don’t know how much discretion we have” to channel the funds to small businesses or players other than those identified in stimulus legislation.

Early into the discussion, attendees raised the controversial issue of noncompete agreements in employment contracts in Massachusetts. Noncompetes (as we’ve written) are seen by many local companies as an essential way to protect trade secrets, but they’re seen by many entrepreneurs and investors as an impediment to employee mobility and innovation. Coakley said …Next Page »

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A new draft bill that would limit but not outlaw noncompete agreements in employment contracts in Massachusetts is being floated by two members of the state’s House of Representatives.

The bill combines elements of separate bills introduced earlier this year by Representatives William Brownsberger of the 24th Middlesex district and Lori Ehrlich of the 8th Essex district. Brownsberger told Xconomy this morning that the new bill is intended in part to head off objections among business leaders to his earlier bill, which would have outlawed noncompete agreements altogether.

Many employers in the state believe that noncompete agreements are needed to keep employees from leaving with company secrets and starting directly competitive businesses. Some venture capitalists and technology executives, on the other hand, argue that the agreements punish budding entrepreneurs and harm the local economy, by forcing employees either to stay with their current companies and forego starting new ventures, or to abandon Massachusetts for places like California, where noncompete agreements are unenforceable.

The compromise bill, which adopts much of the language in Ehrlich’s first bill, will likely be heard by the House Committee on Labor and Workforce Development this fall. Unlike Brownsberger’s original proposal, it allows companies to require workers to sign noncompete agreements as a condition of employment. But it creates incentives for employers to limit the terms of these agreements to 6 months, down from the 12 months in typical employment contracts today. It also cuts out restrictions that judges in contract dispute cases might see as overreaching—and it automatically awards attorneys’ fees to employees in such cases.

For employees who make less than $100,000 a year but more than $50,000, the bill limits the acceptable rationale for enforcing noncompete agreements to just two: protecting trade secrets or confidential information. And for employees who make under $50,000 a year, the bill makes noncompete agreements unenforceable for any reason.

At this point, Brownsberger’s earlier blanket proposal to outlaw noncompete agreements—a proposal endorsed by a coalition of venture capital partners, company executives, and industry associations—would seem to be dead in the water. But the new proposal would still bring significant changes to Massachusetts employment law, and probably has a much greater chance of surviving the coming legislative debate.

“We got a very positive response [to the earlier bill] from the VC community and from employees who had had bad experiences, but we got a very negative response, particularly from smaller businesses and many of the smaller high-tech companies,” Brownsberger says. “Companies are very emotional about this issue and feel very strongly that we were taking away from them protections that are vital to their survivability. So we listened carefully to those concerns and attempted to craft a bill that would improve the venture climate, provide employees with some real relief from overreaching noncompete agreements, yet at the same time allow businesses—particularly small businesses—to protect what they feel is vital to their survival.”

The Brownsberger-Ehrlich bill appeases employers by preserving most of the existing legal levers available to them when enforcing noncompete agreements in court. A noncompete agreement should be seen as valid, the bill says, whenever it’s needed to protect an employer’s trade secrets, confidential information such as product development plans and marketing strategies, or “goodwill,” meaning customer relationships.

But there are exceptions in the bill: the goodwill argument can’t be applied to employees making under $100,000, and employees making under $50,000 are exempted altogether. To keep employers from imposing draconian terms, the bill would award attorney’s fees to employees in any cases where a judge finds that the employer has overreached. And the bill explicitly scraps a legal argument sometimes used to keep ex-employees from going to work for competing companies, even in the absence of a signed noncompete agreement: the “inevitable disclosure doctrine,” under which courts presumed that any departing employee would betray trade secrets.

“What we’ve done in the final legislation is give employers very strong incentives to draft only the most reasonable noncompete agreements,” says Brownsberger, who represents a district including Belmont, north Cambridge, and east Arlington. What’s considered reasonable? The bill spells that out, too: “Number one, they can be no more than 6 months in duration,” Brownsberger says. “Number two, …Next Page »

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Next week, the U.S. Senate is expected to take up debate on health care reform. Regardless of what happens in Washington DC, the impact will be felt on virtually every business and individual in Washington State.

Without question, a simple solution to our health care crisis is elusive, and in the coming days and weeks many complicated and important issues will be debated, but from where I stand today, there is one key health care issue with no room for debate.

The issue is the development of a pathway for regulatory approval of biosimilars by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Biosimilars, as the name implies, are drugs that are similar to, but not the same as, innovator biologics. Biologics are molecular structures that can be hundreds of times more complex. That’s why copycat versions of biologics aren’t called “generics.” Biotechnology-based therapies that fight diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s are made from living cells—a process far more complex than the one used to manufacture chemical-based drugs such as aspirin.

The illustration below helps to put into perspective the differences between small molecule drugs and biologics:

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To give a sense of size, same-scale computer models of three drugs—aspirin (a small molecule), somatropin (human growth hormone), and Herceptin (an antibody)—are presented as an example of the relative complexity: The molecules are to scale and the objects are not, but the objects (bike, car, private jet) indicate relative size and complexity of these molecules. Used with Permission. Source: Genentech
http://www.gene.com/gene/about/views/followon-biologics.html

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Here in Washington State, we are fortunate to have great leadership on this issue from Representative Jay Inslee (D, WA-1). Rep. Inslee is one of the lead sponsors of the Pathway for Biosimilars Act (H.R. 1548), bipartisan legislation that protects patient safety and strikes the appropriate balance between increasing competition and maintaining our nation’s status as the world’s leader in science and innovation.

Rep. Inslee wants to make sure that biosimilar manufacturers are required to provide the FDA with clinical data on the safety and efficacy of their medicines. And his legislation preserves incentives for …Next Page »

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Until now, the only way to read the 400-plus-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (otherwise known as the Stimulus Bill) has been to download a 13-megabyte PDF version or scroll through messy, unpaginated HTML versions. But now Tizra, the Providence, RI online publishing company we profiled in February, has used its platform to create a searchable online version of the bill that breaks the giant document into easily navigable sections.

The Tizra version preserves the bill’s original formatting and page numbers, allowing users to reference or bookmark specific sections. The idea is to make the whole bill more Web-friendly—for example, by making it easier to cite specific spending provisions in the bill via social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Delicious. Tizra has also added a commenting function that lets users share their thoughts about specific pages of the bill.

“There is no single piece of information or legislation that has gained so much attention in recent times, yet there was clearly a lack of easy and useful access to this historic bill,” Tizra’s chief operating officer, Abe Dane, said in a statement. “With the media focusing so much attention on who actually read the bill, we thought it would be helpful to see how easy it was for the public, media and lawmakers to access and research it.”

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Massachusetts Representative Will Brownsberger filed a bill today calling on the state legislature to outlaw the non-compete agreements that prevent many Massachusetts residents who leave their employers from finding work at similar companies.

The brief bill, entitled “An Act to Prohibit Restrictive Employment Covenents,” would amend Section 19 of Chapter 149 of the General Laws of Massachusetts, which deals with general employment provisions. It renders void and unenforceable “any written or oral contract or agreement arising out of an employment relationship that prohibits, impairs, restrains, restricts, or places any condition on, a person’s ability to seek, engage in or accept any type of employment or independent contractor work, for any period of time after an employment relationship has ended.” Violators would be liable for the affected employee’s attorney fees. (We’ve reproduced the full text of the bill on Page 2.)

I first wrote about the pending bill last month. Brownsberger, who represents the 24th Middlesex district, including parts of Belmont, Cambridge, and Arlington, said then that he’s primarily interested in helping service workers such as telephone agents, who often leave their positions only to find that the non-compete clauses in the employment agreements prohibit them from finding comparable positions in their industries. “I’m concerned that these agreements are often entered into by employees who are at a substantial bargaining disadvantage,” Brownsberger said.

But non-compete agreements are also the subject of debate in the entrepreneurial community. Critics such as Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital in Boston, have said that they retard innovation and hurt Massachusetts startups relative to their rivals in states like California, where non-compete agreements are illegal.

In a recent blog post, Richard Tibbetts, a co-founder and software architect at Lexington, MA-based StreamBase Systems, called Brownsberger’s proposal “a simple legislative change which will cost the government little and have a big impact on Massachusetts competitiveness.” Tibbetts posted the text of a letter he wrote to his Congressional representative, Sean Garballey, urging him to support Brownsberger’s effort. The letter says in part:

In some cases, potential employees have declined to pursue discussions with me, fearing legal repercussions from their previous employer. In other cases, employees have requested that they not work with certain customers or on certain lines of business, in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety…While these agreements are seldom enforced, their existence and the legal grey areas surrounding them are a drain on our economy. They hurt workers, who are not able to change jobs freely and make use of their skills in the best jobs possible. And they hurt companies, making it harder to recruit the best employees. Removing noncompetes will help everyone in Massachusetts benefit more from our skilled workforce.

According to Tibbett’s post, Massachusetts Senator Patricia Jehlen plans to sponsor a Senate version of Brownsberg’s bill. Other legislators wishing to co-sponsor the anti-non-compete bill have until February 6 to add their names to the bill. The bill is expected to be referred to the House Committee on Labor and Workforce Development, which will likely hold a hearing on the proposal this spring, Brownsberger said last month.

Update, January 16, 2009: New blog posts applauding Brownsberger’s initiative have been published this week by Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe and Angelo Santinelli of Dakin Management and North Bridge Venture Partners.
…Next Page »

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In case anyone didn’t get the memo, energy prices are going up.

This trend will most likely continue for two very simple reasons: Worldwide energy demand is rising, and global fossil fuel supplies are tightening.

Add to this the need for critical action on the part of all nations to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in response to what is now a preponderance of evidence that continued reliance on fossil fuels will result in catastrophic changes to our climate and eco-systems.

It has been prophesied by some that taking state-level legislative action on climate change by capping allowable GHG emissions would place a tremendous burden on our local economy—especially at a time when the economic outlook is not all that rosy to begin with. The thesis is that, by forcing our businesses to pursue energy-saving measures, and adding more expensive renewable energy into the supply stream, we will greatly add to their expense burden, thus reducing their competitiveness.

Don’t believe it. And here’s why:

Let us, for a moment, take a cap on GHGs off the table, and look at the long term. Assuming a continued, steady rise in energy prices over the coming decades (something many experts now predict), our businesses are going to be faced with a sizable expense burden as energy prices become a larger and larger line item on their balance sheets. What’s worse, there is nothing to suggest that it will level off—and why should it? The basic laws of supply and demand dictate that that when supply is constrained in the face of surging demand, prices shoot skyward.

While Bay State businesses will inevitably respond to these market signals by implementing energy efficiency measures on their own, there is an opportunity here to move faster—and in doing so, provide our businesses and our economy with two substantial benefits.

So let’s now put GHGs back on the table, and talk specifically about why Massachusetts should pass the Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA, or Senate Bill 2531)—which calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

Benefit number one: Global competitiveness.

If we simply wait until federal legislation caps GHGs for us (and I think we all know federal legislation is coming), then the bulk of Massachusetts companies will move with the crowd. Under the GWSA, our companies will be ahead of the curve, streamlining their operations in advance of the federal mandate, and gaining first-mover advantage in the process. As energy prices rise, our companies will be better prepared to keep energy expenses under control through early action and better planning. The bottom line: our companies will ultimately be stronger and healthier competitors as a result of this legislation.

Furthermore, as the GWSA (and the Green Communities Act, Massachusetts’ comprehensive energy bill now in conference committee) substantially increases the amount of electricity derived from renewable energy, we will start to create a hedge against rising fossil fuel prices. While it won’t happen tomorrow, renewable energy will, at some point, be cheaper than traditional sources, and having a strong local supply of clean energy will allow us to pay less (perhaps significantly less) in the future.

Benefit number two: Sector leadership.

Energy transformation is non-optional—at the state level, at the national level, and worldwide. In short, we must develop technologies to replace fossil fuels not only because of climate change, but because they are finite resources. But here’s the good news: If we implement a cap on GHGs, we will unleash what is perhaps the greatest economic asset of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—our ability to innovate.

The Global Warming Solutions Act, the Green Communities Act, and the Green Jobs Act (which includes funding for clean energy R&D and entrepreneurship) will catalyze a tremendous increase in clean energy investment and new venture creation, which in turn will create jobs and grow our local economy.

Skeptical? Consider this: In a report to Governor Schwarzenegger and the Legislature, a multi-agency Climate Action Team led by the California EPA projected that California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32) will increase Californians’ personal income by roughly $4 billion and create approximately 83,000 jobs.

Worldwide, clean energy was a $77 billion market in 2007, and is expected to grow to $1 trillion by 2030. Roughly a dozen U.S. states are working aggressively to claim their piece of this prize; while Massachusetts certainly boasts all of the ingredients required to compete, let us not be complacent.

The Global Warming Solutions Act, the Green Communities Act, and the Green Jobs Act will substantially up the odds that we will establish a strong, growing cluster of clean energy companies here in the Commonwealth, and emerge as a leader in what will inevitably one of the largest technology markets in history.

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Cell Therapeutics got its way in Washington DC today. The Senate voted 69-30 in favor of a Medicare bill that includes a provision extending the current reimbursement rate for doctors who prescribe Zevalin, a drug for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which happens to be the Seattle biotech company’s sole marketed product. Medicare had proposed a new reimbursement system that would have paid prescribers less for the drug, said company spokesman Dan Eramian.

Zevalin is the first of two drugs approved in the U.S. that combine an antibody that can seek out tumors with a dose of radiation to give it extra tumor-killing kick. The drug has shown striking results in clinical trials, yet has never taken off commercially, partly because of wrangling between payers and doctors over its cost.

Researchers at the American Society of Hematology presented data from a clinical trial in December that showed a single shot of Zevalin caused tumors to completely disappear for 76 percent of patients. Yet it only generated $16.4 million in sales in 2006, its fifth year on the market. One reason: Medicare typically pays less for the drug than it costs hospitals to administer it, researchers told me last December while I was at Bloomberg News.

The proposed changes would have only exacerbated the problem.

The vote by the Senate means the Medicare bill now goes to the desk of President Bush, Eramian said. It basically allows for an 18-month extension of 2007 reimbursement rates, which pay $21,000 a patient for the drug. If Congress had agreed with Medicare, the new rate would have been about $15,000 a patient. Now it will be up to Cell Therapeutics to see if it can actually get doctors to start using it.

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Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick stole the show at last year’s gathering of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. In front of a crowd of 20,000 global biotechies meeting on home turf in Boston, he broke news that he planned to invest $1 billion over 10 years to strengthen the state’s position as a leading hub for life sciences companies. Tomorrow, he reports back at this year’s BIO conference, in San Diego. The headline: his life sciences plan has been officially signed into law.

Patrick will use a keynote speech Tuesday to discuss the plan in more detail. He’s sure to get an adoring reception from a pro-industry crowd, which loves to hear the words “cures” and “jobs” listed as payoffs in the same sentence. In fact, the organization is expected to recognize Patrick as “Governor of the Year.”

It took a while for the Patrick administration to agree on specifics of the life sciences bill with the Massachusetts Legislature, although the House ultimately voted 134-13 in favor of it and the Senate gave the final go-ahead in a 31-7 vote last week.

“This is a big deal for Massachusetts and for the country,” said Cyndi Roy, a spokeswoman for Patrick. “The Governor is absolutely excited about this. It’s been a long time coming.”

The final bill contains $500 million for infrastructure to support the industry, $250 million in science grants and small business assistance and another $250 million in tax credits, according to a summary on the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council’s website. The plan is designed to help the state remain strong versus the likes of California, which is sinking $3 billion into a stem cell research plan, and hungry competitors from overseas, such as Singapore and Ireland.

Besides Patrick’s appearance at BIO, the state hopes to impress conventioneers with a pavilion on the trade show floor. The goal will be to recruit new companies to the Bay State, and convince others to expand operations they already have, Roy said. The state’s economic development boosters say they can’t afford to skimp on marketing this year, or any year.

“Since it’s not in Boston, we won’t have the same kind of presence we had last year, but the state understands that to attract business to Massachusetts and show it is a place to grow your business, as with any marketing effort, there needs to be money for it,” said John Heffernan, vice president, policy and external affairs for the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. “This isn’t Massachusetts versus just any state. This is a global economy. We need to demonstrate we have the talented people.”

The Massachusetts plan has sparked curiosity from officials around the world, said Linda McGoldrick, worldwide director of the Drug Information Association, a non-profit group of 30,000 regulators, scientists and industry officials based outside Philadelphia. It’s likely that other regions will want to form collaborations with Massachusetts institutions now, rather than try to build from scratch what has been growing in Massachusetts for decades, she said.

“Boston has been in the sights of the U.K. and Western Europe for some time, and in Japan and across Asia, the appetite is growing for more life sciences investment,” McGoldrick says. “China is building facilities fast, and they have been shopping, if you will, for opportunities and resources.”

While it may take years for the payoffs to show up, it will be interesting to watch whether Patrick’s investment sparks further investments and collaborations with other governments and institutions from around the world. You can bet some of those discussions will be happening this week at BIO.

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The Massachusetts House has passed its version of the 10-year, $1 billion life sciences bill by a vote of 134 to 13. The provisions of the bill, which largely mirror Governor Deval Patrick’s original plans for the biotech initiative, include $250 million for tax credits, $250 million for research grants, and $500 million in bonds for capital projects.

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