How Puget Sound biotech stacks up

I’ve been reading parts of a new report put together by Battelle for BIO, the national biotechnology trade and lobbying group. It looks at where biotech activity is growing around the U.S.

Two thoughts as I read through it: The Puget Sound region is still a big biotech cluster. But there are many other cities, including some I wouldn’t have expected, growing at a faster rate when it comes to bioscience jobs.

Battelle counts 13,617 people employed in the biosciences in the Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma region as of 2004. That seems lower than most other counts I’ve seen. Anyway, that puts 17th on the list, behind the obvious clusters in San Diego, the San Francisco Bay area and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. But it also puts us behind places like St. Louis and the Dallas metro area, and just ahead of Detroit and Salt Lake City, none of which come to mind immediately as big biotech centers.

We’re heavy in the medical device sector (take a look at just the ultrasound companies in Bothell for an example) and in the biotech research and development industry, but the region’s still light on drug manufacturing and other related bioscience work.

Here’s the report, which comes in PDF form: http://www.bio.org/local/battelle2007/BIO2007RegionalPerspective.pdf.