June 20, 2005|
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June 20, 2005 |
By Alan Zibel But they're big, and they're well-known, said Das, executive vice president for business development at the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore, a regional economic development group. "Everything is going to be a pipe dream until we bring in the right companies," said Das, a 2000 graduate of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who has worked as a management consultant, a software executive and as a policy fellow in the U.S. Senate. The Economic Alliance is playing a key role in marketing both the East Baltimore initiative and the University of Maryland, Baltimore's BioPark on the city's west side. Das said the East Baltimore park will likely have a mix of early-stage and mid-sized companies, plus offices of major pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies that don't yet have a mid-Atlantic presence. "You're going to see some big deals go through," he said. The Economic Alliance has been organizing meetings with department chairmen from Hopkins to learn about their research and are then setting up meetings between Hopkins researchers and top executives at biotech and pharmaceutical firms. They hope major companies will want to establish offices at the East Baltimore biotech park and license Hopkins professors' research in such areas as cancer, immunology, neuroscience and biomedical engineering. They hope those relationships, combined with a detailed economic analysis of the advantages of coming to Baltimore will help convince companies to locate in East Baltimore. "These companies need to have a business case explained to them why they need to make the investment next to Hopkins," said Christian Johansson, president of the Economic Alliance. Hopkins has long been a leader in scientific discovery, but the biotech industry in Baltimore has been much slower to get going than in the San Francisco Bay Area or Boston, where a class of entrepreneurs and venture capital firms already existed from the technology industry. "There's no debate that there's great technology being developed at Hopkins," said Rene Salas, head of Ernst & Young's mid-Atlantic biotech practice. "The issue is commercialization of the technology locally." Dr. Solomon Snyder, director of the neuroscience department at the Johns Hopkins University and co-founder of Baltimore bioscience company Guilford Pharmaceuticals said having companies located next to campus would expose faculty to industry. "Very few faculty know anybody in the pharmaceutical industry," Snyder said. Dr. Chi Dang, vice dean for research at Hopkins said that the faculty -- long wary about working with industry -- is experiencing a "cultural shift." While the primary mission of the university is patient care, research and education, researchers do want to see their work wind up in products that are delivered to patients. "We do want to make a difference with our inventions," he said. © 2005 American City Business Journals Inc.
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