The Boston and San Francisco areas have an outsized role in biotech — and that role might be getting bigger, Bruce Booth writes at Life Sci VC.
Startups in those key biotech clusters have outperformed ones in other regions, he says, arguing that this could be due to a consolidation of capital and talent in those regions. Massachusetts and California lead the way in terms of National Institutes of Health funding and also have secured the majority of venture capital funding in the US, he says.
Booth notes that quantifying talent is a bit trickier, but says that key clusters have seen increases in R&D employment.
"As these data suggest, the great consolidation of talent and capital into the two key clusters has clearly been happening in the past decade — and shows no signs of abating any time soon," Booth writes.
This leads him to suggest that civic and other leaders within key clusters remember to bolster their infrastructure, while those outside those clusters could entice companies to their region with funding or credit advantages. There, companies could "be the big fish in the small pond," he says.
Booth adds that, of course, investigators wanting to start a company could also just join in the consolidation and relocate to those hubs.