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Maryland's biotech industry: Headed for boom or bust?
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When I tell people that I study biotechnology, they often don’t understand what I mean. I also sometimes find it hard to define, because the term “biotechnology” implies different things to different people. One explanation that I like states: “Biotechnology refers to the use of living organisms or their products to modify human health and the human environment.”
Acts as simple as brewing beer and baking bread to as complex as recombining the genetic material from one organism with another to produce organisms with new desirable traits are all part of what one may consider to be biotechnology. Biotechnological innovations have the potential to diagnose and treat disease, provide the world with food, solve environmental problems and much more.
By all accounts, the biotechnology industry in Maryland seems to be booming. Biotechnology parks linked to major research universities have sprung up and are expanding on both sides of the city of Baltimore. The University of Maryland has its BioPark on the Westside, and the Science + Technology Park at Johns Hopkins is located on the Eastside. The University of Maryland Baltimore County has a biotechnology incubator called BWTech@UMBC where start-up companies are nurtured until they are robust enough to strike out on their own.
Over in Montgomery County, plans for a possible 900-acre research campus, an extension to existing portions of the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center, are under careful consideration. Part of the Gaithersburg West Master Plan, some folks refer to the proposed addition as a “Science City” because it may include retail space and housing alongside research facilities and office space.
All this biotech-centric real estate development aims to attract scientists and their intellectual property to Maryland and keep them here, eventually turning the state into a thriving biotechnology hub comparable to, or even surpassing, those found near Boston or in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. That’s a lofty goal and perhaps a little unrealistic, in my opinion. But at minimum, these efforts should create jobs, slow the state’s intellectual “brain drain,” and foster collaborations between the state, private industry, academia, and federal entities, such as the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, located nearby.
Also, these biotech-focused activities support Gov. Martin O’Malley’s Maryland Bio 2020 Initiative, although he certainly did not concoct these big biotech dreams. Announced last year at this time, O’Malley’s initiative proposes to boost Maryland’s bioscience industry with an infusion of $1.1 billion over the next 10 years. This was reported, at the time, to be “the largest per capita investment in the biosciences made by any state in the country.” [I was not able to confirm whether this is still, actually true. If you know, post a comment.]
With all this biotech cheerleading going on lately, it was slightly disturbing to learn earlier this month that the University of Maryland System (USM) planned to restructure the 25-year-old University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) and split its four research centers (medical, biotechnology, marine and environmental science) among several state schools. This news came on the heels of the report that UMBI’s president, Jennie Hunter-Cevera was taking a job as an executive vice president for a non-profit research institute called RTI International in North Carolina.
Starting July 1, UMBI’s new acting president will be Edward Eisenstein,the current director of its Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology (CARB). Over the next twelve months, USM Chancellor William “Brit” Kirwan will work with Eisenstein to transition the institute’s current facilities, programs, students and staff.
Why did the Board of Regents decide to break up UMBI, when the state plans to spend the next decade investing in this apparently booming industry? It almost looks like the right hand does not know what they left hand is doing. But the reasons are simple; it all boils down to money.
Despite the fact that UMBI creates $25 million in research activity each year, Robert J. Terry of the Baltimore Business Journal (BBJ) reported that USM regents Chairman Clifford Kendall described the problems with the institute's organizational structure as “intractable.” These included, Terry wrote, “the inability to scale UMBI programs, isolation among UMBI’s research centers, the lack of a critical mass of graduate and undergraduate students involved in UMBI research, and administrative inefficiencies.” These issues prevent multidisciplinary collaboration and block access to research funding opportunities, the regents says.
The disassembly of UMBI will require hard labor, which in a more stable economy probably would have been put off. But in today’s economic climate, the redundancy and inefficiencies created by UMBI’s campuses in Rockville, College Park and Baltimore could no longer be tolerated. Not with funds and personnel stretched beyond measure everywhere else.
It’s sad to say that UMBI, the first biotech center in the state, will one day be no more. But the Regents say, as was reported elsewhere in the BBJ by Julekha Dash, that faculty tenure will be honored and administrative support staff will be able to keep their jobs until June 30, 2010. Kirwan claims this restructuring could potentially “double the research productivity of UMBI’s current assets within five years.”
For the sake of everyone involved and for the future of biotechnology in Maryland, I sure hope Brit is right.
For more information on the biotechnology graduate program in which I am enrolled, click here.
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