How do you actually build a biotechnology industry in a specific location? Simply having a critical mass of universities and research institutions is not enough — facilitating the formation and growth of biotech companies requires consistent effort. The timescales are often long, and which research will lead to viable products is not always clear. Diane Fabel of the Stony Brook Center for Biotechnology explains:
Diane Fabel, interviewed via Zoom on July 13, 2023
Interviewer: Antoinette Sutto
“Go back to the decades, let’s say the 1990s. All of a sudden people are becoming aware of biotech and it’s very promising, and they thought, “Well, we have all this great science going on here on Long Island, so all we have to do is create a space for the faculty members to go and build their companies.”
It was like, “Build it and it would happen.” Incubators started popping up all over the place, but then they realized that, “Well, that’s really not enough.” Maybe the innovation is, certainly, within the region and it’s within the academic institutions, but it doesn’t translate itself. It’s not sitting there ready on the shelf all ready to be licensed. You have to proactively identify what innovation has the potential to have a commercial impact or a healthcare impact, and then you have to proactively develop it.
After the whole incubator thing started, it didn’t really change the landscape because institutions like Cold Spring Harbor and even Stony Brook, which has a stated economic development mission, technologies would come down the pipeline and the tech transfer office would license that technology to whoever the best partner was. At that time, [that] was almost never a Long Island or New York State partner because the industry was in California at the time, and, of course, then Boston emerged. We still fight that.
Anyway, so politicians thought, “We’ll just build the incubators and it’ll automatically be seated on Long Island.” Of course, it wasn’t. We need to put that infrastructure in place so that we see it years in advance coming down the pipeline, and we are looking at it as a community to determine whether or not it has the potential to be a company, [and] be a company here.”