Massachusetts in Top Quantile of U.S. Biosciences According to 2012 Battelle/BIO Report

At the 2012 BIO International Convention, BIO released their Battelle/BIO State Bioscience Industry Development 2012 report. This report analyzes the industry’s impact on the economy and recent employment trends to give an overall snapshot of how the bioscience industry is doing and also goes through a state-by-state analysis of the industry.

If you read the MassBio 2011 Industry Snapshot (2012 edition coming soon!), you know that numbers have been very good for Massachusetts (we’re home to the top 5 NIH-funded hospitals, MA receives a high percentage of VC funding, etc.), so it was no surprise to see that Massachusetts fell in the report’s Top Quantile. The report summarized Massachusetts by saying:

Massachusetts is home to a large, highly specialized, and growing bioscience industry. Since 2001 the sector has grown by 15 percent and managed to maintain job gains during the more recent period since 2007 which includes the deep national recession. The state is diverse across the subsectors with three of five having a specialized employment concentration in 2010—research, testing, and medical labs; medical devices and equipment; and drugs and pharmaceuticals.

Massachusetts also made a strong showing in the introductory, industry-overview sections of the report. Here is just one example:

Figure 5. Bioscience Employment Change by State, 2001-10

(Page 11 of the Battelle/BIO report)

In their press release, BIO shared some key general findings of the report:

• From 2001 to 2010 the U.S. bioscience industry gained jobs, despite wide-spread job losses across America.
• During that time, the bioscience industry grew by 6.4 percent, adding more than 96,000 jobs. By comparison, total employment for all private sector industries in the U.S. fell by 2.9 percent, losing more than 3 million jobs.
• The majority of the jobs added were in research, testing and laboratories, , adding 23.8 percent to the workforce or 87,000 jobs.
• The U.S. bioscience industry weathered the recession much better than the overall economy and other leading knowledge-based industries.  While national private sector employment fell by 6.9% from the outset of the recession in 2007 through the first year of the recovery in 2010, bioscience industry employment fell a mere 1.4%.
• The biosciences has a broad footprint across the nation – Thirty four states and Puerto Rico have an employment specialization (20 percent or more concentrated than the nation) in at least one of the five bioscience subsectors (drugs and pharmaceuticals, medical devices and equipment, research, testing and medical laboratories, agricultural feedstock and chemicals, and bioscience-related distribution).
• The bioscience sector continues to be a source of high-wage jobs. The average bioscience job paid $82,697 in 2010, $36,000 more than the average private sector job.

Read the full report here.