With the Trump administration threatening key ingredients of Boston’s recipe for biotech success — including federal grants and visas for international students and workers — could some other place rise to become the next Boston?
Probably not, is the simple answer. It would be hard for any place to replicate the tight-knit scientific ecosystem that connects Harvard and MIT with world-class hospitals like Massachusetts General and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Yet many other cities have watched and learned how to harness their own research universities and hospitals to drive innovation, drug discovery, and life science startups. They want to do what Greater Boston has done, and hope the next Biogen or Moderna is born in their city instead of here.
Last year the Toronto Region Board of Trade even dared to say out loud what other cities have been thinking by organizing a symposium titled “Can Toronto be the Next Boston?”
They even invited Travis McCready, former chief executive of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, perhaps hoping he’d spill the region’s special sauce. His advice: Don’t set out to be Boston — carve your own path.
“There is only one Boston, and there can’t be another,” explained McCready, who’s a top executive at commercial real estate giant JLL.
More likely, he said, several cities will rise up to claim more pieces of the biotech pie. Instead of one Boston atop the industry, there’ll be multiple hubs, a half-dozen or more each with their own advantages — and some will woo startups and star scientists who’d otherwise put their roots down here.
For example, a new JLL report confirms Boston-Cambridge’s dominance as the top overall life sciences cluster in the United States, followed by San Francisco and San Diego, based on talent, funding, and lab space. But San Francisco gets higher marks than Boston for its startup ecosystem, medical technology innovation, and integration of artificial intelligence, while New Jersey and North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham research triangle both outscore Boston in terms of biomanufacturing.
But McCready thinks Boston’s greatest challenge will come from overseas.
“The rest of the global community has caught up,” McCready said. “They have wind in their sails, and they’ve created bespoke environments that are very unique and that are formidable in their own right.”
Two places are high on McCready’s list of regions to watch: One is Shenzhen, China, which produces about 30 percent of all life science global licensing transactions. That’s happening as China’s biotech sector is taking a bigger and bigger share of the global market, largely at the expense of the United States.
The other is the other Cambridge, 45 minutes from London in the United Kingdom, where the University of Cambridge boasts 125 Nobel Prize winners, and where economic development leaders are pushing to turn the city into Europe’s life sciences capital.
“Many people who hear the word Cambridge UK, they think about medieval buildings and a small university town, and fish and chips,” said Michael Anstey, a venture capitalist and cofounder of Innovate Cambridge, a three-year-old initiative to turn the British college town into a global innovation hub. “What we’ve been putting out into the world is actually what Cambridge UK really is: the most dense ecosystem of innovation.”
Indeed, by one measure — the United Nations’ Global Innovation Index, which tracks patents, scientific publications, and venture capital deals — Cambridge is per capita the second-most intensive innovation cluster in the world, one notch below the San Francisco Bay Area and one above Greater Boston.
The University of Cambridge, of course, has been there since 1209; it’s more than twice as old as Harvard. What’s been missing in the Cambridge ecosystem is the drive to commercialize scientific discoveries and the capital to launch startups around them, though that, too, is changing. The amount of venture capital flowing into Greater Cambridge has grown tenfold in a decade, to $2.3 billion. That’s still small — the Boston market drew nearly $8 billion last year — but the other Cambridge goes far with the money it has, touting 26 “unicorn” startups worth $1 billion or more linked to the University of Cambridge.
And Kathryn Chapman, executive director of Innovate Cambridge, sees a competitive advantage in the current instability roiling US science. Researchers and students who like Cambridge, Mass., might find they like Cambridge, England, just as well.
”We encourage diversity. We want people to come over,” she said. “We’re definitely seeing a bit of a shift. I don’t know how long that will be for, but we will continue to provide an environment that is entirely attractive to global talent.”
Other US life science hubs face similar headwinds with the federal government pulling back on research funding and international visas, but those cities with lower tax rates and lower costs of living may become more attractive as government grants shrink.
That’s not lost on places like Houston, where business leaders smell opportunity.
“It takes a long time to get to number one, but that’s always been our objective,” said Steve Kean, chief executive of the Greater Houston Partnership. “We’re aiming to win here, and I think we’re gonna.”
Perhaps that’s a bit of Texas bravado speaking, but like Boston, Houston boasts a nexus of research universities and academic teaching hospitals, from Baylor College of Medicine to University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. And just last month the city’s life science ecosystem got a big vote of confidence when pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. announced it would build a $6.5 billion manufacturing facility there.
One big reason the United States has outpaced the rest of the world in life sciences is the billions the federal government pours each year into research. Over the last quarter-century, Boston-area institutions have drawn over $45 billion in funding from the National Institutes of Health, according to the City of Boston’s research department.
On top of that, Massachusetts — under governors Deval Patrick, Charlie Baker, and Maura Healey — has committed $2.6 billion to bolstering the state’s life sciences ecosystem. That kind of investment, which began in 2008 with a $1 billion initiative during the Patrick administration, helped propel Boston far ahead of then-rival San Diego.
With federal cutbacks, Healey now wants to do more and has proposed a $400 million package for the state’s nonprofit research institutions and universities to help make up for lost grants.
Harvard economist Amitabh Chandra, who has studied the productivity of life science hubs, said that if foreign governments step up their investments and the United States pulls back, clusters in China and Europe over time — from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to Germany’s Max Planck Society — could take slices of the Boston biotech business.
And there’s a precedent for hubs of knowledge falling from their perch. Germany, for instance, lost its research edge in the 1930s, when top scientists, including Albert Einstein, fled the country; many came to the United States, including universities here, and helped spark a wave of innovation during and after World War II.
Will Boston suffer a similar fate? It’s too early to say.
“It could happen depending on how we handle things,” said Chandra. “If we start to make things really bad for science and scientists, then the industry will shrink, and it’ll shrink throughout the United States.”
And despite its formidable advantages, anchored by Harvard and MIT, Boston will not be immune.
So maybe rather than holding tight to biotech as it’s currently known, Boston should start thinking about embracing the next big thing. Noubar Afeyan, cofounder of Moderna and founder and chief executive of Flagship Pioneering, is beginning to widen his lens.
“We can’t coast on our past successes, or on the other hand be totally cowed by the challenges we’re facing,” he said. “The next revolution in biotech is coming; AI and its potential power to drive scientific discovery is going to help us decipher more of nature’s complexity than ever before, opening doors to everything from new cancer treatments to new energy solutions.”
That sort of adaptability has long been a strength of Massachusetts, which has reinvented itself time and again to match economic shifts, from maritime industries to manufacturing, high tech to life sciences.
And so, this threat to Boston’s biotech preeminence could be an opportunity, said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at think tank Brookings Metro, especially if it pushes people here to find the next big thing.
“Being paranoid,” he said, “is very healthy.”