Context: I moved to Miami for the year of 2017 while continuing to work remotely at Mount Sinai in NYC. The contrast between the academic and biotech ecosystems between Miami and New York was startling, which inspired me to dig a little into the strange history of Florida's attempts to duplicate the magic of biotech districts which have been built up in North Carolina and San Diego.
In 2003, the renowned fiscally conservative governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, went on a biotech spending spree. Then-governor Bush spent ~$1.5 billion to entice a motley crew of research institutes into opening franchises around the state. Most prominently, a Florida branch of the Scripps Research Institute was opened in Jupiter. The researchers were promised lavish funding, Florida tax-payers were promised suspiciously precise numbers of "jobs created". More than a decade later, Scripps Florida is still clinging on, lonely between a golf club and a strip mall. Other research centers were opened in similarly isolated locations and have since died (or are in the process of dying). The Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies has been defunded because it "failed to meet job-creation targets". The Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute in Port St. Lucie has not only closed, but is being sued and even had a police investigation into trashed documents. The Burnham Institute in Orlando is being pursued by the state of Florida for $80 million, again for not "creating" enough jobs. The lone exception to this pattern of failure seems to be an independently thriving research & biotech scene around the University of Florida in Gainesville.
The Research Centers:
- Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute Florida to lay off remaining employees, shut down by Oct. 1 (2015)
- Talk of town when it arrived, Draper Lab sounds retreat from Tampa Bay (2015)
- Sanford Burnham Prebys wants out of Florida (2016)
- Florida cuts funding for Torrey Pines in Port St. Lucie (2016)
- Scripps Florida: Hyped bio-tech boom went bust (2010)
Post-Mortems:
- Florida: Second thoughts (2011)
- Jeb Bush's unfulfilled promise shows the perils of building blockbuster biotech clusters (2015)
- Jeb Bush Spent a Billion Dollars Trying to Be the Walt Disney of Florida Biotech — and He Failed (2015)
- Trouble in biotech: Years after Jeb Bush tried to kick-start the industry in Florida, has it made much progress? (2016)
- Why biotech strategies are often 21st century snake oil (2016)
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