Leading biomedical hubs such as Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego have long been the envy of the nation. Aspiring biotech centers elsewhere, such as those in Texas and Florida, seek to duplicate their success.
Los Angeles has also caught biotech fever, with leaders there looking enviously at what San Diego has accomplished on Torrey Pines Mesa.
Biotech’s well-paying jobs and mission of curing diseases makes it both an engine of economic growth and an industry with broad public appeal.
However, building a biotech cluster is harder than it looks. Top biotech hubs like San Diego’s possess several defining characteristics, all of which must be present. Money and science are certainly two necessities, but they’re not enough ….
World-class entities such as UC San Diego, the Salk Institute, the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, The Scripps Research Institute, West Health and the J. Craig Venter Institute’s La Jolla campus are spread along roughly two miles of North Torrey Pines Road, along with research facilities for major pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis, Pfizer, Celgene and Vertex ….
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