By Brice Wallace
Among the accolades and glowing statistics about Utah’s economy, a couple may have slipped under the radar.
Not only is Utah 13th-ranked among states for employment in the life science industry, it tops all states in industry employment growth. In the period of 2011-15, its headcount grew 25 percent.
“People think of the growth in California or Minnesota, but I was so surprised when I saw this, that we were the fastest-growing life science industry here in the state of Utah,” Kelly Slone, BioUtah’s president and chief executive officer, told the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) board at its October meeting. “So that really shows us that there’s a lot of activity happening.”
And it’s that kind of success that Bio-Utah, the state’s life science industry association, is hoping will become better known in the future.
“What I found when I moved here is the industry as a whole has not been together telling the story of what’s happening in the industry. That’s my goal: to get this message out,” Slone said.
Launched in 2012, BioUtah has about 150 member companies from among 1,000 life science companies in the state, the latter figure including nutraceutical companies. Life science is a wide umbrella, with companies involved in manufacturing and research and development in biopharmaceutical, medical devices, diagnostic testing, medical labs and as service providers.
Those 1,000 companies have 33,623 employees earning an average wage of about $64,000, Slone said.
But BioUtah wants to see those figures grow. Among its goals are increases in the number of jobs, finding ways to attract and develop talent, increase access to public and private capital, and advocate public policy initiatives that impact the life science ecosystem.
Utah has a strong ecosystem that supports the industry, including a friendly business environment, university systems that provide leadership, and public/private partnerships. Among those partnerships is one with GOED, under which funding for GOED’s Technology Commercialization and Innovation Program (TCIP) has double-annual grant funding, as well as leading to the development of a medical innovation career pathways program.
Companies in the industry have had lots of successes recently, she said. Among the ones cited by Slone:
• Stryker opened a 137,000- square-foot neurotechnology training and manufacturing center in Salt Lake City. • Varian Medical Systems completed its spinoff of Varex Imaging Corp., based in Salt Lake City.
• Merit Medical Systems acquired Catheter Connections.
• Forbes listed PolarityTE as one of the world’s most innovative companies.
• DiscGenics Inc., a medicine company focused on spinal illnesses, has gotten the go-ahead from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to proceed with a human clinical trial for its first product candidate, called IDCT.
“We’re starting to see a lot of excitement in this industry,” Slone said. “We look forward to working together with GOED and the whole governor’s team to put together this story. We just hired a PR firm to help us build a marketing and branding campaign similar to Silicon Slopes, to really start telling the story, so I’m hoping you’re going to be hearing more and more about this industry.”
BioUtah likely will armed with refined statistics when telling that story when the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah completes a pending study of the life science industry’s economic impact in the state.
“We hear about the IT sector, how wonderful it is, what Silicon Slopes has done and how successful it has been,” said Jerry Oldroyd, the GOED board’s chairman. “But I think sometimes we overlook the importance of the life sciences industry in Utah. It’s been a major economic driver and it’s an area that’s growing very, very quickly in Utah.”
BioUtah will have its annual Utah Life Science Summit on Nov. 3 at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City. Among the scheduled speakers are Gov. Gary Herbert; Tom Polen, president of BD Medical; Natalie Gochnour, associate dean at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah and director of the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. Details are at http://utahlifesciencesummit.com/.