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Posted Oct 25, 2020, 10:04 PM
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Chris
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Join Date: Aug 2020
Location: Earth
Posts: 1,969
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Quote:
Originally Posted by summersm343
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Very long article, but I posted the text below. Basically stating that Philadelphia is poised to become a leader in cell/gene therapy and bio-med, competing with Boston.
I sure hope city leadership reads this article and cradles this industry. This industry is the future and Philadelphia has a chance to be an international leader. This is a chance for council and the mayor to do something right and work with the Philadelphia economy, rather than against it.
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A few weeks before the Covid-19outbreak began to wreak havoc in March, Amicus Therapeutics held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its $25 million global research and gene therapy center, a project the New Jersey biotech company opted to establish in the University City section of Philadelphia.
Guest speakers for the event included Penn Medicine gene therapy pioneer and Passage Bio co-founder Dr. James Wilson. Wilson spoke about the medical breakthroughs he expects to happen at the uCity Square site and expressed how happy he was that Amicus — with whom he is collaborating — didn’t pick a different location for the center.
“I’m glad this isn’t in Kendall Square,” said Wilson, referencing the heavily populated life sciences business district outside Boston that features lab and research space, retail, housing, innovation space, and even a museum. “Philadelphia is the new Kendall Square.”
While Boston and other life sciences hotbeds may get more attention, Philadelphia has emerged as a leading center for cell and gene therapy. The challenge the region now faces, particularly in a Covid-19 environment, is how to keep that momentum going in order to create more companies, help those already located here expand, convince others to move here, and keep the investor dollars flowing. Doing so would lead to more high-paying jobs, more tax dollars and a stronger local economy. One estimate pegs the industry’s potential for job creation in the region at 7,600 new positions.
Cell and gene therapy are both biologic treatments. In cell therapy, cells are cultivated or modified outside the body, then injected into a patient to replace or repair damaged tissue or cells. The cells can originate from the patient or a donor. With gene therapy, diseases are treated by replacing, inactivating or introducing genes into cells. The process can be done inside or outside the body. Some therapies, which involve altering genes in specific types of cells in the lab and then inserting them into the body, are considered to be both a cell and gene therapy.
Sam Woods Thomas, director of life sciences for the Philadelphia Department of Commerce, said prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the region — already home to about three dozen cell and gene therapy companies — was getting heavy interest from others in the field looking to set up local operations.
Even before Covid hit, Woods said the city viewed cell and gene therapy companies as a key driver for future economic growth and has been exploring “creative ways” to attract them. The coronavirus outbreak has heightened the importance of the sector, he said.
“Cell and gene therapy companies, and really the life sciences industry in general, have jobs people can’t do from their home,” Thomas said. “These are companies that really haven’t taken a break [during the pandemic]. They really are essential businesses.”
Dr. Steven Nichtberger, CEO of Cabaletta Bio, was optimistic about the local industry growth in an interview just prior to the outbreak. His cell therapy company went public last year and has raised nearly $200 million since its inception.
“We are at a tipping point,” Nichtberger said in a February interview. “We are going to define an employment stream for Philadelphia that is a brand-new resurgence. We’re talking about very intellectually stimulating important jobs being created right in the center of Philadelphia. I don’t know whether we’ve gotten the recognition to this point that we should have. We have all these companies — Tmunity, Carisma, Passage Bio, Limelight Bio, and on and on — that have started up, and there no signs of slowing down.”
The importance of cell and gene therapy companies for the local economy hasn’t changed as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak.
“The pandemic has highlighted the fragility of the economic foundation of Philadelphia, and frankly all cities,” Nichtberger said. “If there is one industry that’s been recognized as crucially important to society, it is the health care industry. Innovation and advancing science is as important as ever. Cell and gene therapy will be as important as any platform for the next decade or two, and in Philadelphia we have a strong base for growth in terms of the companies that already are seeded and the many more that are coming.”
Philadelphia’s ability to lay claim to being a top location for cell and gene therapy began with two major milestones.
Penn researchers developed what in 2017 would become the Novartis product Kymriah, the first CAR T-cell therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The therapy genetically engineers improvements to a patient’s own T-cells to improve how they fight cancer.
Later the same year, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia spinout Spark Therapeutics received approval for the first gene therapy used to treat an inherited disorder. The product, Luxturna, was approved for a retinal disease found in children that, if untreated, leads to blindness. The company, still anchored in Philadelphia, was acquired by Roche for $4.3 billion in December and is now a subsidiary of the Swiss drug maker.
Since those cell and gene therapy product approvals in 2017, dozens of cell and gene therapy startups have launched in the region, and attracted more than a billion dollars from investors.
Last year, MLP Ventures’ Discovery Labs and Deerfield Management established The Center for Breakthrough Medicines, a cell and gene therapy contract development and manufacturing organization in Upper Merion.
Also in 2019, a $1.65 million public-private initiative was launched to promote the region as a cell and gene therapy hub. Eleven area businesses, universities and research institutions each contributed $150,000 over three years to fund the effort being led by the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia’s CEO Council for Growth division.
Claire Marrazzo Greenwood, executive director of the CEO Council for Growth, said the idea was to create a public-private partnership where everybody works as a cohesive unit when promoting and marketing the region’s cell and gene therapy strengths. The goals of the regional Cell and Gene Therapy and Connected Health Initiative include developing shared messaging, assessing and supporting infrastructure and the needs of companies, and attracting talent.
The timing of the launch coincided with Philadelphia hosting BIO 2019, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s annual international conference that brought 18,000 life science industry representatives from around the world to the region.
The group worked with the University City Science Center and the University City District on a workforce needs assessment. A May analysis calculated Philadelphia-area employment in these sectors is expected to grow by at least 35% and as much as 136% over the next decade. That translates into anywhere from just under 2,000 to more than 7,600 new jobs created.
Adaptimmune Therapeutics, which has its U.S. headquarters at the Navy Yard, has already added 50 jobs this year.
CEO Adrian Rawcliffe said while the clinical development of some of Adaptimmune’s new drug candidates have experienced pandemic-related delays, the company continues to expand its Philadelphia staff. The company expects to fill another 60 job openings over the next six months, he said. Many of the new hires were found nearby.
“Drug discovery talent abounds in Boston, but the drug development talent is here,” Rawcliffe said. “You can put a pin [in Philadelphia] on a map and draw a circle with a 50-mile radius around the city and you can find almost all the major pharmaceutical companies — and many of those companies have downsized. And when you are talking about cell and gene therapy, a lot of that talent is here.”
The culture that has evolved in the region among the cell and gene therapy companies is more cooperative than competitive, Rawcliffe said.
“I realize that we aren’t going to be able to meet the career aspirations of everybody who works here,” he said. “So I am not going to prevent them from pursuing opportunities with other companies here to advance their career.”
Greenwood said the CEO Council for Growth’s cell and gene therapy initiative group has sought to “deputize” people to be ambassadors for the region when they are out speaking at conferences and other gatherings. For example, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia CEO Madeline Bell, Quil CEO Carina Edwards and ChristianaCare CEO Janice Nevin all used the group’s shared messaging and materials when speaking on panels at public gatherings before Covid struck.
The pandemic has made the group rethink its promotional tactics to accommodate a world where conventions and conferences are on hold, Greenwood said. One plan in development is a virtual tour to show off the region’s life sciences strengths online and through social media.
“As we think about the potential for economic recovery, all of these efforts are more important than ever — and continually being reinforced,” Greenwood said. She noted the Philadelphia Regional Recharge and Recovery Taskforce created this summer identified promoting the area as a cell and gene therapy hub as an important part of that effort.
Local efforts to attract new cell and gene therapy companies, and help existing ones grow, has included establishing an inventory of what the city has in terms of real estate and where it could place labs and manufacturing space.
Some of the the key areas the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. is marketing are in University City, the Navy Yard, Grays Ferry and the Lower Schuylkill region.
“There are four essential verticals you need to have to attract these kinds of companies: talent, real estate, venture capital, and institutions,” Thomas, of the city’s commerce department, said. “We are really, really strong in institutions and talent.
“You have a company like Imvax, which had [Dr. David Andrews] working incredibly hard out of his lab at Jefferson, that is now ready to try to commercialize their immunotherapy,” Thomas said. “They grabbed 25,000 square feet at the Curtis Center.”
That location in Old City was great in the eyes of the commerce department because it expanded the footprint of where life sciences companies were establishing headquarters.
“We need to aggressively target companies and aggregate manufacturing space,” he said. The city and state have a variety of incentives programs to attract new businesses within their borders, such as innovation zones and opportunity zones that provide tax credits. Those types of incentives aren’t always a good fit for life sciences companies that aren’t producing revenue.
City officials are putting an emphasis on attracting life sciences manufacturing companies with jobs that don’t require advanced degrees, Thomas said.
While the city has a role to play in supporting and attracting gene and cell therapy companies, Thomas said a “heavy buy-in” from the state is also needed. He noted how states like Maryland, New York and North Carolina have all committed hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure and incentive programs targeting the life sciences industry to boost their economies.
The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development’s major life sciences initiative, according to spokeswoman Rachel Wrigley, occurred in 2001 when the state allocated $3 million to establish three “Life Sciences Greenhouses” — including one in Philadelphia. The “greenhouses” have invested in more than 250 early-stage biotech, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, creating about 5,400 jobs across the state.
Thomas said institutions also need to play a role in growing the cell and gene therapy sector. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center created a $1 billion venture fund in January to invest in life sciences companies, he noted.
“I’d be willing to bet, not to throw shade at Pittsburgh, that the science coming out of Philadelphia is better,” Thomas said.
In this part of the state, the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 agreed to invest up to $50 million to help local researchers and doctors establish life sciences companies near its West Philadelphia campus. Last year, the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center launched its $50 million Hatch Biofund to support startups, but that venture fund has not yet made its first investment. Thomas also said other institutions such Thomas Jefferson University, the Wistar Institute and the Science Center have implemented programs like Penn to help companies that “start here, grow here and expand here.”
Thomas sided with Penn’s Wilson in believing Philadelphia has more to offer cell and gene therapy companies than the famed Kendall Square in Cambridge.
“What does it have?” he said of Kendall Square. “It has higher rents, higher cost of living, higher lab costs and they are reaching a critical mass. What it does have is a leg up on when it got started. Philadelphia has better public transit and is much more affordable. The challenge we have is to learn to work with companies that don’t have revenues. We’re going to have to be more creative designing incentives.”
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