Flames for biotech still burning if the money is right
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By Jim Turner
Posted at 10:17 AM on October 18, 2007
To hear the experts at this week's BioCon, Florida has been feeding its biotech hearth at an extraordinary pace.
But we're in danger of having the furnace go cold, they say; despite word that research firms are lining up for a chance to bask in our well funded sun.
Port St. Lucie and St. Lucie County are courting the Santa Clarita, Calif.-based Alfred E. Mann Foundation for Scientific Research.
The research firm's little brother, the biotech developer Alfred E. Mann Center, is now looking to buy 22 acres at the Florida Center for Innovation at Tradition, where it wants to build a five or six building complex.
The idea is purely a speculation that research firms will want to set up shop.
The Center has built only other project and that was for the Foundation. Yet we're told that any speculation about this complex leading to the Mann Foundation expanding to the Treasure Coast is also mere speculation.
Besides, they say, the Foundation would need tens of millions of dollars to make the move to Florida. Such money may not be readily available from city and county officials who have been forced to cut back on budgets and a year ago put up $50million - not including the land Core Communities gave - to sway Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies to Port St. Lucie, rather than Boca Raton.
Meanwhile, Palm Beach County, still smarting from the Torrey Pines rebuke, is now poised to put up $86.7 million for the German Max Planck Society. And the St. Petersburg Times reported this week that the next scientific research outfit in talks about expanding to Florida is New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
The Institute, founded in the 1934, grew up as a think tank in World War II, before blossoming as a computer science research center.
Research leaders like Dr. Richard Lerner, president of Scripps Research Institute, and Richard Houghten, president of Torrey Pines, are calling for the state to set aside another $250 million in its Innovation Fund, the kindling to recruit research organizations to Florida.
We've already dished out nearly $1 billion in state and local funds, for Scripps, Torrey Pines, Burnham Institute in Orlando and SRI International in St. Petersburg.
In the next round, Max Planck alone wants $94.9 million from the state.
No price tag has been placed on Courant, nor is there word on which cluster in Florida it wants to be a part of.
Economically these latest developments are good and bad.
Good because it shows that the state's efforts into the research field, and the possibility for a high tech culture taking hold, one that will enhance the state's workforce and university system, is being taken seriously by the international science crowd.
Bad because we're still not at the stage where companies are willing to come to Florida simply because this has been the trendy research happening.
And that means if we want to keep the flames of the Florida biotech industry flickering, we have to decide how much currency we're willing to feed into the fire.
Posted at 10:17 AM on October 18, 2007
To hear the experts at this week's BioCon, Florida has been feeding its biotech hearth at an extraordinary pace.
But we're in danger of having the furnace go cold, they say; despite word that research firms are lining up for a chance to bask in our well funded sun.
Port St. Lucie and St. Lucie County are courting the Santa Clarita, Calif.-based Alfred E. Mann Foundation for Scientific Research.
The research firm's little brother, the biotech developer Alfred E. Mann Center, is now looking to buy 22 acres at the Florida Center for Innovation at Tradition, where it wants to build a five or six building complex.
The idea is purely a speculation that research firms will want to set up shop.
The Center has built only other project and that was for the Foundation. Yet we're told that any speculation about this complex leading to the Mann Foundation expanding to the Treasure Coast is also mere speculation.
Besides, they say, the Foundation would need tens of millions of dollars to make the move to Florida. Such money may not be readily available from city and county officials who have been forced to cut back on budgets and a year ago put up $50million - not including the land Core Communities gave - to sway Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies to Port St. Lucie, rather than Boca Raton.
Meanwhile, Palm Beach County, still smarting from the Torrey Pines rebuke, is now poised to put up $86.7 million for the German Max Planck Society. And the St. Petersburg Times reported this week that the next scientific research outfit in talks about expanding to Florida is New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
The Institute, founded in the 1934, grew up as a think tank in World War II, before blossoming as a computer science research center.
Research leaders like Dr. Richard Lerner, president of Scripps Research Institute, and Richard Houghten, president of Torrey Pines, are calling for the state to set aside another $250 million in its Innovation Fund, the kindling to recruit research organizations to Florida.
We've already dished out nearly $1 billion in state and local funds, for Scripps, Torrey Pines, Burnham Institute in Orlando and SRI International in St. Petersburg.
In the next round, Max Planck alone wants $94.9 million from the state.
No price tag has been placed on Courant, nor is there word on which cluster in Florida it wants to be a part of.
Economically these latest developments are good and bad.
Good because it shows that the state's efforts into the research field, and the possibility for a high tech culture taking hold, one that will enhance the state's workforce and university system, is being taken seriously by the international science crowd.
Bad because we're still not at the stage where companies are willing to come to Florida simply because this has been the trendy research happening.
And that means if we want to keep the flames of the Florida biotech industry flickering, we have to decide how much currency we're willing to feed into the fire.
