We arrived in New York last night and we joined a friend for dinner in Williamsburg at a joint called Tacu Tacu, a Peruvian/Thai place (they had an excellent ceviche platter). Eventually talk drifted to biotechs. Apparently Bloomberg in collaboration with Alexandria Real Estate initiated a project to develop some land on the Island of Manhattan for biotech companies. It will be located on the east river near NYU.
It's about time.
In Boston, biotech and big Pharma are everywhere. Partnerships between academic institutions and private industry are plentiful, and researchers in both settings gain a lot from these interactions. But right now there is only a couple of small biotechs on the island of Manhattan. In Boston Merck is a stone throw away from Harvard Medical, Novartis is a short walk from MIT and the Whitehead, while in NYC there aren't any big companies near Rockefeller, Sloan-Kettering, Cornell Med, NYU or Columbia. Merck and other big outfits are all in Jersey.
Why?
Well the first problem is that real estate in Manhattan is not cheep cheap. And it wasn't cheep cheap when all the biotechs sprouted up, roughly over the past last 15 years. Sure there are some itty-bitty biotechs around the main academic institutions, but as soon as these startups get too big they have to move out.
This has hurt academic researchers and industry alike. Cities are a great fermentation vat for ideas. Are biotechs attracting young dynamic innovative researchers by being isolated in the suburban wilderness? I'm not saying that all biotechs should move to the urban center, but that some could benefit by being located in the midst of all these great research ceneters .... especially in Manhattan.
When it comes to NYC, both academia and industry are suffering. Here's a story for you: a good friend of mine was looking for academic positions all throughout the US and Europe. At one point he was considering an offer from one of the big universities in Manhattan ... of all his offers, the NYC institution gave him by far the best offer. But despite this he ended up starting a lab in the Bay Area.
Why?
There were plenty of reasons, but a big factor was that his partner wanted to leave academia and work in industry. If they had moved to Manhattan, the only biotech she could have worked for in the city itself, ImClone, was having problems and weren't hiring. If they had chose the New York offer, she would have had to take a job in Jersey.
So will things change? I hope so.
OK enough of this long winded post. I'm off to breakfast.
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Of course buying a house/condo in the Boston area is another problem. So you get to work in Kendall Square and live in Lynnfield and commute for an hour. Maybe better to live close to work and take the one hour trip on a weekend Sat. night? Remember, too, there are universities in Jersey: Princeton, Rutgers, Montclair, etc. I'm not sure all academics appreciate the distorting influence of biopharma in their faces all the time.
Dr. Dude - how do you spell "cheep"??
Thanks ted. As everyone can tell from my blog, my spelling is atrocious.