Kudus to our partners at Mass Bio for releasing their industry snapshot Aug 30, 2021 which provides a high level synopsis of the Massachusetts biotech market. The report covers job growth, investment and the future drug pipeline.
The big news is the amazing amount of investment that is going to VCs and companies. Mass companies raised an astonishing $4.3 billion in venture capital funding in the first quarter of 2021 alone, after raising $5.8 billion in all of 2020. This is driving growth in jobs, real estate, company valuations while applying pressure across the local ecosystem in terms of housing, transportation, and childcare.
Employment
Mass biotech employment grew 55% since 2000 and 5% 2020. The core area of growth continues to be in R&D jobs (8.5% growth) and the average salary of a biomanufacturing employee is $160,000. The top five employers are Takeda, Sanofi, Biogen, Novartis and Vertex. Although Cambridge and Boston is where the action is, 56% of MassBio dues paying members are outside of those two cities. There has been a corresponding growth in real estate and over 21.6 million square feet of lab space has been built in Massachusetts over the last 10 years, an increase of 117%.
Investment
Ten percent of NIH funding comes to Mass which is the second highest US state recipient after CA. MA received $3,295,748,531 in 2020 from NIH. Mass bio tech companies raised $5.8B in venture funding in 2020. The biggest winners were companies in the Oncology, CNS, and anti-infectives spaces and include Elevate Bio’s Series C of $525M, EQRx Series B of $500M and Adagio Therapeutics raise of $336M.
In 2020, there were 21 IPOS raising $3.9B and for the first half of 2021 there are have been 10 IPOs raising $2.9B here in MA. 2021 is the year of the SPAC and pending mergers include Synthetic Biology favorite Ginkgo Bioworks ($17.5B), Valo ($2.8B) and Pear Therapeutics($1.6B).
Future
The Drug development pipeline looks strong for Mass companies. 18 drug candidates are up for FDA approval and Mass drug candidates represent 14% of the US Pipeline and 7% of the Global pipeline. Oncology products represent 33% of the pipeline.
All and all a great report card!
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