How do you build a biotech industry? Is it something that simply develops organically and without intervention given the right combination of people and resources, or does it require a little more direction? In the case of Long Island, at least, experience has shown that favorable initial conditions and a lot of enthusiasm are not enough. The right geography and a critical mass of academic and other research institutions are all key, but creating and sustaining a new industry is a process that requires resources, planning and guidance.
The job of the SUNY Stony Brook Center for Biotechnology is to facilitate this process. Founded in the 1980s under the directorship of Richard Koehn, the Center has spent the past forty-some years refining its role as facilitator between researchers and industry and developing strategies to encourage academic-corporate collaborations. Ginny Llobell, who served as assistant and acting director in the late 1980s, Diane Fabel, the Center’s operations director since 1990, and Glenn Prestwich, director for several years in the 1990s, all describe the excitement of the early years of biotech on Long Island, as well as some of the things about the industry and its growth that no one knew back then and no one could have predicted.
In the 1980s, one of the biggest challenges was resistance from the faculty. Academic scientists were skeptical and in some cases openly against relationships with industry. Diane recalls “skepticism” on the part of Stony Brook science professors about connections to the commercial world, as well as a deep concern for preserving the university environment, which was understood to be focused on knowledge, not profit. Academia didn’t immediately embrace commercialization. Stony Brook chemistry professor Glenn Prestwich recalls his own initial reluctance to lead the Center in the 1990s. As he put it, he was not a “biotech guy” and had no wish to become one.
Often, it was a challenge to get scientists and representatives from industry into the same room with one another. What worked to motivate suspicious scientists? As Diane put it, faculty were being asked to “take a call from me, who they didn’t know, to meet with a company that they didn’t know. Why would they want to do that?” Faculty members’ time was limited, and time devoted to meeting with industry was time that couldn’t be devoted to research and publication, two of the cornerstones of a successful academic career. One draw was to offer something useful in return. The Center offered small seed grants for research, for testing new and potentially commercializable ideas on a small scale. This was not something offered by the federal government (the primary funder of scientific research), and it proved useful in encouraging contact and collaboration between researchers and industry.
But more than this, it was necessary to build professional relationships. This was and has remained one of the Center’s primary tasks. Ginny Llobell, who was involved in leading the Center in the late 1980s, describes organizing cocktail hours and evening networking sessions with anyone who was willing to attend, with socializing intermingled with more technical presentations that would encourage scientists and other specialists to come. Local patent attorneys, real estate developers, equipment suppliers, etc. were also there. At that point, the biotech industry on Long Island was not well developed. As a result, Ginny’s strategy was to find “any company that had any biology, chemistry, biochemistry,” or companies involved in “healthcare and medicine. I tried to bring those parties together with the parties at Stony Brook” who were doing research relevant to these companies’ interests. She also started a job fair, bringing together companies from all over New York State and recruiting students to attend — this proved successful and became an annual event.
One of the big game changers was faculty success. Diane recalls the impact that Barry Coller’s development of ReoPro®, a powerful drug used to treat certain kinds of stroke, had on the attitudes of his colleagues. Ginny Llobell also notes the importance of the story: “Coller invented the drug and did some early development, and it was licensed, further developed, and commercialized by a biotech start-up called Centocor, which was later acquired by Johnson & Johnson, largely due to Centocor’s ownership of ReoPro®.” It was a big deal. As Diane puts it, “nothing impacts [attitudes] more than for a faculty member to be successful in some commercial endeavor. At Stony Brook, when Barry Coller commercialized ReoPro it was just a huge impact on the culture.”
But in addition to convincing reluctant academic scientists, there were challenges that operated on a slightly larger scale. One was the idea that a thriving biotech industry could be brought into motion like a spaceship in a vacuum — one big blast of momentum at the beginning and off it goes. But the situation on the ground is more complicated than that. Diane describes the surge in interest in biotech in the 1990s, and the “build it and it will happen” mentality. This involved two assumptions.
One was that the path from research to its commercial application was clear and obvious, but it isn’t. The innovation was there, but “it doesn’t translate itself” on its own. “It’s not sitting there on the shelf ready to be licensed. You have to proactively identify what innovation has the potential” to be a commercial product, and “then you have to proactively develop it.” There needs to be planning at every step of the way, to identify the commercializable aspect of a given research program, to work out where more research might be needed, to figure out the right field of application, because this might not be obvious, and so on.
The second assumption had to do with timing and strategy. As was the case for other nascent life-sciences ecosystems across the country, economic development professionals here assumed that incubator programs would automatically keep new technologies on Long Island. But this was not what happened. It quickly became evident that it was necessary to put more infrastructure in place much earlier, to consider which technologies might find a home in the local economic constellation, and work out how to facilitate this. Related to this was the mismatch of political timelines and research timelines in the early years of the industry. “Political timelines are short, and biotech is long and capital intensive. It’s often been difficult to make the case for ‘why biotech?’ when it doesn’t fit neatly into the framework that elected officials are operating in. Where are the jobs? Where’s the capital investment? It’s spread over 30 years. That was the problem.” Diane’s predecessor Ginny Llobell also comments on the optimism early on about how quickly companies would emerge from the incubator. Politics and science work in very different ways and on very distinct timelines, and one of the challenges of developing a biotech industry is that it has to be integrated into both sets of gears.
These days, understanding of timelines and constraints — on the part of scientists, investors and everyone else — is far more sophisticated now than it was thirty or forty years ago. But there are still bumps in the road. What would help create a smoother pipeline from research to commercial application? Diane notes that if you want to increase the number of commercializable patents emerging from within universities, one important thing is to “help the faculty understand what the commercial application of their technology is.” Basic scientific research tends to be highly specialized, and researchers have enough to do to keep up with developments in their own field. No one can have an in-depth knowledge of every discipline. As a result, a technology might go unrecognized, or its potential untapped, because the person who discovered it is doing cancer research, for example, but “the real market opportunity for that technology is in diabetes.” Another thing that many people in both industry and academia mention is the fact that patents do not count toward tenure, which makes many early-career scientists hesitant to devote too much time and energy to commercial ventures.
Looking back, what do the early days of biotech on Long Island look like seen from the perspective of 2023? Diane describes a number of lessons learned. The first was that everyone had overestimated the speed at which biotech would become a dominant part of the region’s economy. “We all thought that the industry cluster in New York was going to take hold a whole lot faster. We were envisioning a decade, not three decades….We have had very unrealistic expectations, totally underfunded for what we’re trying to do.” Another was that incubators alone were not enough to jumpstart the industry. Diane and others assumed that the Stony Brook biotech incubator was going to be a big turning point, but although “it was definitely a stepping stone,” it “wasn’t the final answer.”
Another change is the presence of even greater interest and support on the part of the state government. Nassau County, for example, will be the site of a cell and gene therapy innovation hub that the state government plans to establish. (For further information about the state government’s plans to develop biotechnology in New York, see this publication from the Life Sciences division of Empire State Development.)
Finally, the culture of science has changed, both here and elsewhere, in ways that benefit those interested in developing the industry. In the past, there was a fairly strong “siloing” of academic institutions and a strong division between academia in industry. This silo effect has softened in recent decades as collaborations have been put together that would have been hard to imagine back in the 1980s. Diane instances one between Rockefeller University, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Cornell University, and a corporate partner. “The fact that they just could get together…and the fact that they could get everyone together in agreement,” is astonishing in a way, “because prior to that, each of the institutions was an independent entity…Things are changing.”
One thing that has remained constant over the last thirty years, however, is the “passion of the faculty and the entrepreneurs” for getting new technologies to market. The excitement has always been there, even if there is still a long way to go. “We are seeing the impact of decades of dedication and investment in the Life Sciences” says Clint Rubin, Director of the Center for Biotechnology since 1997. “The Center for Biotechnology’s economic impact now exceeds $80M annually, and we have a robust network of industry partners and investors interested in the region. Companies like Codagenix, Envisagenix, and Mirimus, all with Long Island roots, are thriving, and new companies are being launched on a regular basis. We may just be reaching the tipping point. It is an exciting time to be in biotech.”