Innovation in the States

As the year opens, the country's regional media examine their local economic growth drivers.

The Seattle Times asks whether the great northwest can accrue enough biotech companies, a critical mass, if you will, of both early stage and mature enterprises, to ameliorate the perceived risks that business management and scientific talent might feel about moving to one of the smaller biotech hubs of the country.

In Cleveland, Crain's Business looks at Osiris Therapeutics, a stem cell company based on research coming from the lab of Case Western Reserve University biology professor Arnold Caplan and colleagues.

The publication notes that Osiris recently reported a $19-million venture-capital injection from Swiss private equity fund Friedli Corporate Finance but lamented the fact that Osiris left Cleveland 10 years ago for Baltimore, where the company hoped to attract more talent because of the large biotech presence in Maryland.

In hurricane ravaged Louisiana, the Shreveport Times sees opportunities for venture-capital investment in a state reinventing itself. Certainly, it's not a big leap to the think that the state could target biotechnology as an economic engine for the future. Every other state is.

The Manufacturer, a trade publication for the manufacturing industry, looks at the activity in technology transfer in academia and provides a couple of meaty statistical paragraphs and news of a new website, www.innovationbridge.com, from the Kauffman Foundation providing open access to early-stage innovations and click-wrap online licensing. The 18-month pilot is limited to seven universities: the University of North Carolina, Cornell, the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, Washington University in St. Louis, and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. (See New Biology Economy, November 29, 2005, for a list of the leading universities in terms of patents granted)