State Spending on Biotech Creates Jobs

Yeah, jobs for Chinese workers.

A Roswell Park Cancer Institute technology that already has shown promise in hunting down and killing cancer cells with minimal damage to surrounding tissue has been licensed to a Chinese pharmaceutical giant for a $1 million initial payment and a share of what could be a very lucrative market for the process in China. Buffalo News 1/24/10

Its going to have to be VERY lucrative to even make a dent in what the tax payers have spent on Roswell over the years. Roswell received $118 million in State support in 2009 alone.

One of the things we are told over and over again, is that State and federal spending on biotechnology will results in lots of jobs and prosperity for people in Buffalo and Western New York.

Buffalo News Feb 14, 2001

Officials in Buffalo and here at the Capitol are working to craft a newly proposed (University at Buffalo) Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics to help companies launch high-technology products and ideas. The importance for Buffalo, though, will be jobs. And if the program’s excited proponents are to be believed, there will be lots of jobs– centered at research companies and spinoff firms that will take the ideas now only dreamed of and turn them into real products.

Buffalo News Aug 26, 2001

Initial estimates by local officials suggested that a (University at Buffalo Bioinformatics) research center in Buffalo could lead to more than 4,000 jobs over five years, as scientists are hired and their work creates business spinoffs, with an economic impact of almost $500 million in that time.

Buffalo News Sep 27, 2007

Expansion of the medical campus, the growing UB downtown beachhead and the cooperation of the two public-service entities can only help make the troubled downtown core and its nearby residential neighborhoods better places to live and work. For its money, the medical campus picked up the old Trico Products Corp. buildings at the corner of Goodell and Ellicott streets. The realistic plan is to help the medical center continue to attract bioscience-related businesses that will provide both well-paid jobs and state-of-the-art health care.

Buffalo News Oct 12, 2008

The development of a knowledge-based economy — at UB, the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus and elsewhere — is this region’s ticket toward prosperity

This Chinese deal with Roswell illustrates a main criticism with Biotech. We spend the money to invent these technologies and then off the technologies go to other parts of the U.S or foreign lands to be developed and produced. (A common related criticism, we spend billions of tax dollars and job creation promises are never met or kept.)

There is no guarantee that if a blockbuster drug materialized, it would be manufactured and marketed in the same place it was developed and tested. NY Times – Despite Odds, Cities Race to Bet on Biotech

Since 1999, the Center has been awarded over $88 million in taxpayer funding by the legislature for grants and loans to biotech companies, equity investments and other expenses, all “to create jobs.”

So how did those investments fare? According to a report in the Triangle Business Journal, the Center netted a 41-percent loss on investments in just two years, and total losses from 2000-07 have exceeded $11 million. In fact, just this past year, TBJ reported that a $10 million dollar NC Biotechnology Center investment in an Eno River Venture Capital Fund had lost $9 million, causing Senate Finance Committee Chairman David Hoyle (D-Gaston) to remark, “If we gave them $10 million and got $1 million in return, then I’d say that’s a pretty sorry job. I wouldn’t be willing to give them any more venture capital money. I could throw darts that would be better than that.” NC Capitol Monitor

State auditors on Thursday delivered a fairly glowing report on the Legislature’s 2001 decision to invest $200 million in Oregon Health & Science University’s expansion.

The audit made little mention, however, of the unrealized biotech bonanza that the investment was supposed to spawn.

the report barely mentioned the key driver of OHSU’s pitch to the Legislature and the public at the time: that $200 million in state funding would jumpstart a major biotech industry expansion and create thousands of new jobs, just as the state’s high tech industry was fizzling.

The biotech industry, the private-sector jobs and the industry activity on South Waterfront have not materialized in a meaningful way. OHSU has certainly grown in intervening years, adding some 2,000 employees, but the university has faced renewed financial upheaval that has stunted plans. Oregonlive.com

A solar panel company that received $58 million in state aid to build its factory in Massachusetts is now moving jobs overseas.

“No one should be surprised,” Montigny said. “Many of us have spoken very aggressively on the floor of the Senate against these boondoggles and they continue to happen. The biggest and most egregious right now are the billion dollars going to waste on the bio-tech industry.” wbur.org

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