RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC—North Carolina Governor Beverley Purdue will be the opening speaker at the NC Council for Entrepreneurial Development’s annual two-day Biotech 2009 event today at the Raleigh Convention Center. In a podcast interview preceding the event, Steven Burke, vice president of corporate affairs at the NC Biotechnology Center took a wide-ranging view of how North Carolina became a major biotech hub and the importance of the industry to the state’s future.

In the podcast interview conducted by Raleigh-based public relations firm MMI Associates, Burke points out that NC already boasts more than 500 companies and 56,000 workers in the biotechnology sector. “It is an enormously pervasive, enormously well-positioned and enormously important industry across this state,” Burke says.

“We have in biotechnology a lead sector for the economic vitality of North Carolina for the next 25 years.”

While the Research Triangle region is well-known for its biotechnology cluster, Burke notes that because the biotech industry “deals with everything from agriculture to food from trees to drugs,” it is “largely positioned across the state and yields applications across the state.”

Burke acknowledges that the biotech industry is pervasive and competitive worldwide. Indeed, in the Southeast alone, South Florida climbed quickly into a top ten spot and Atlanta is coming along as a player.

North Carolina’s biotech industry, says Burke, “is particularly rich, dynamic, engaged and successful – and probably for three main reasons.”

“The first reason for our success is the breadth of the range of biotechnology in North Carolina.”

The state biotech industry, he says, “addresses pharmaceuticals and biofuels, native plants and trees, regenerative medicines and nanobiotechnology, marine resources and plants altered to produce proteins, new industrial processes and ways to look at the health of swine and poultry.”

The Biotech Center also often notes that North Carolina has vast forest and plant resources in the West, a growing marine biotechnology cluster on the Eastern coast, rural areas suitable to large biotech manufacturing facilities, and not only the three large research universities anchoring the Triangle, but also a robust community college system and other sizeable universities.

Second, he says, the reality of the state’s accomplishments in the industry over a period of years.

“Our outcomes from that science are strong in company activities, in products developed here. This is, after all, a state judged the third-leading place in America for biotechnology outcomes.”

The third reason, he says, is “the unusually strong predisposition of so many diverse biotechnology parties to work together.

“To create a product in biotechnology requires some science, some research, some funding, some commercialization, an educated workforce, training per persons. It requires that products be tested and tried. It requires that policies be appropriate. So many different groups must work productively together for the end result, which is a single product or application benefitting every one of us.”

How it got there
Burke, asked to detail the history of biotech in NC replied, “North Carolina was the first place or state to create a targeted initiative to bring about biotechnology as a matter of long-term state policy and a matter of long-term state gain. Gov. Jim Hunt, one of the speakers at the Biotech 2009 conference, effected in his first term as governor the establishment of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center 25 years ago.

“So, North Carolina, unique among places worldwide, has one quarter-century of history in developing biotechnology. Twenty-five years of experience in how to strengthen our university researchers and our university science, of experience in creating and funding and sustaining small companies, of experience in strategies for the often-daunting task of financing those companies, of strategies for taking science from the laboratory out to a company and to a field and to a hospital room.”

He adds, “North Carolina also has – and we must count this as very important – 25 years of history in making this technology a sustained matter of state policy, of state attention and of state commitment.” The value of doing that is not only the strength of the sector in NC now, but also the promise it holds for the next 25 years, he says.

Resources for startups

Burke outlines the steps a biotech must take, from an idea aimed at solving a serious social need, the science or research necessary to find an answer, initial funding to do experimental work and then with commercialization, testing, and ways to make and sell the product.

“What a lot of stages,” Burke says. “And they are all different.”

North Carolina, he says, “benefits from access to and partnership with good university researchers. A company benefits from good ways to do what’s called technology transfer, which is to take promising ideas from university laboratories to the world of the company.

“Companies here benefit from financing assistance, from venture capital and from other sources. Companies here benefit from the resources needed to test their product and to help move it to verification, be it with the help of a contract research organization – and North Carolina is the leading place in the country for such firms – or help from a research station to enable trial growing.”

But that’s not all. He continues, “In North Carolina, we have a community college training program that’s unparalleled nationwide. And a company also wants assurance that it is going to be in a place in which long-term state policy and long-term state leadership is very much committed to biotechnology and to making that company successful.”

In North Carolina, he says, biotech companies know “there is a predisposition to help them through the Biotechnology Center or other state agencies.”

Burke admits that “We are clearly in a time of economic travail,” and nothing is likely to be exempt.

“The reality, though,” he says, “of enormous benefit is that even in times of acute economic challenge and downtown, society will always need and cries for and will ultimately fund the development of new drugs, new ways to diagnose and treat disease.

“Society will always need more productive ways to use our fields, to grow food, to grow animals, to ensure the health and vitality of agriculture. Society will increasingly need new alternatives to petroleum-based fuels. Society will need biofuel. Our society will need new solutions for cancer, new solutions for industrial processes.

“So, among the areas of society, in the short term at present, likely to be at some degree buffeted by economic downturn, biotechnology is likely to be among those that will have promise to regroup and regain to be strengthened fairly quickly.”

For the entire podcast see:

http://tiny.pl/vbvj