Is Long Island a good place to set up a biotech firm? On the one hand, the region has a dense network of universities and research institutions, as well as proximity to New York. On the other — well, it’s not always that straightforward, as scientist and Protein Databases, Inc. CEO Steve Blose explains. Biotech on Long Island has not yet taken off in the way that investors and entrepreneurs expected.
Steve Blose, interviewed via Zoom on June 1, 2023
Interviewer: Antoinette Sutto
“What Long Island wanted to try and do was to form the local milieu of biotech that they had out here in California around University of California, Berkeley, and so on. That was harder to do for some reason. I guess maybe because of the way the geography was staggered. Cold Spring Harbor did not have land around it where you could develop company sites. You had to go farther out on the east end [of the island], maybe.
We were longing to have the biotech, I guess we call it the milieuof the time, that they were having in California. That’s why we formed the New York State Biotech Association to see if we could develop that. They were thinking about building biotech in Manhattan near what they called the canyons and all these things. It just never could get the traction that the California side had.”