How about that? The Washington metropolitan region has emerged as the No. 4 biotech region in the world based on the number of biotech patents between 2004 and 2006, according to a new Milken Institute report, “The Global Biomedical Industry: Preserving U.S. Leadership.” (Click on chart for more legible image.)
Of course, it’s one thing to create intellectual property, another thing to commercialize it and yet another to build job-creating growth companies. The availability of venture capital is a major competitive advantage for the U.S. biotech sector, says the Milken Institute report, but the authors did not provide data on the availability of venture capital in different regions. Most likely, there is a large gap between Silicon Valley and Boston on the one hand and the Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia region (and everyone else) on the other. Regardless, the concentration of human capital suggests at least one potential growth generator to replace the federal government, which inevitably will sputter as Congress gets serious about controlling spending.
The metro-wide figures are undoubtedly skewed by the presence of Johns Hopkins, the largest medical research university in the nation, on the Maryland side of the Potomac. Still, Northern Virginia has a number of strong biotech assets. This sector bears watching.
— JAB
