Philadelphia downtown cityscape on Broad Street at City Hall.
Philadelphia views itself as a city that should be able to compete more effectively with the likes of New York and Boston as an innovation hub, particularly in the realm of life sciences and healthcare. But it doesn’t have enough serial entrepreneurs, capital, or talent, at least compared with other cities. A Brookings Institution assessment team reached these and other conclusions and made a series of recommendations of how to better position Philly as an innovative city.
It recommended that Philadelphia should focus on building its reputation in precision medicine by making the most of its resources here.
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The Emerging Innovation District Pilot Study, which was produced by the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking, also highlighted digital health and industries tied to the state’s natural gas exploration as opportunities for the city to build an edge. It’s the product of an 18-month research initiative to answer the question of how University City and Center City can help Philadelphia excel on a global stage and improve its role as a regional economic hub.
Some of the 10 institutions that worked with Brookings included Comcast,
Drexel University, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Independence
Blue Cross, the University City Science Center, the University of
Pennsylvania as well as the University of Pennsylvania Health System, and investment manager Vanguard.
Another recommendation from the report was the formation of an Innovation Council — with the influence and authority to bring a diverse group of key industry, public and civic stakeholders together “around a common vision and narrative”. The members of this council would identify a set of strategies and initiatives to grow the regional “innovation economy”, and to identify the organizations best poised to lead each of them.
On the topic of precision medicine, the report noted:
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Given the region’s public and private strengths in the life sciences, its broad clinical care capabilities, its large catchment of patients, and the depth of
bio-specimens (which support future scientific discoveries), we recommend that the council focus its initial efforts on creating a Precision Medicine Catalyst Initiative—a central organizing force that has the ability to pool resources and capture the full value of the region’s research and commercialization capacity in gene therapy. The purpose of the initiative would be to both coordinate existing institutions that specialize in the cluster and connect them with the city’s entrepreneurs and business support services—including law and business programs and industry partners in these areas—with the goal of developing regional expertise in the wrap-around services that the cluster will demand.
The report offered some more specific recommendations for mapping out this precision medicine initiative:
- Appoint an executive director and perhaps other staff with industry and research consortia experience and who understand the commercialization pathways of new cell and gene therapy techniques;
- Convene regional stakeholders to determine specific areas of gene therapy (delivery, diseases, etc.) that multiple organizations are working on and that need the support of more than one institution;
- Seek funding sources that can be highly leveraged, building from Clinical and Translational Science Awards from the National Institutes of Health, membership dues, external funding from local philanthropy, and other sources. It would come at a price, though. It would require an estimated $20 million in funding to develop joint research space and attract star faculty;
- Create a broad economic development platform to build and attract the many auxiliary nonresearch business elements, including finance, insurance, and workforce development;
- Identify opportunities for sharing of clinical data, best practices, and other pre-competitive industry information;
- Form a research fellows program that attracts from outside the region faculty with private-sector research grants, as well as external researchers who have contracts with Philadelphia-based firms, to partner with Philadelphia-based universities and medical schools;
- Build an appointment process to attract star faculty with entrepreneurship and industry interests at partnering institutions in the district;
- Develop an intellectual property framework as well as a joint research partnership template, similar to what has been developed by the Wistar Institute;
- Create a consortium of national and global research institutions with complementary competencies to fill strategic gaps in the region’s research capacity.
Penn, for example, has a gene therapy collaboration with Novartis through the Novartis-Penn Center for Advanced Cellular Therapeutics and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia spinout Spark Therapeutics, a gene therapy company, IPO’d in 2015. Collectively, Philadelphia’s academic institutions generate about $640 million in research funding from the National Institutes of Health. But Philly institutions compete with each other for this funding and other resources. The idea of a citywide collaboration sounds ideal but it ignores the larger reality of the diverse corporate cultures of these groups. If it were so easy to collaborate on a large scale, wouldn’t this have happened years ago? Instead, there are lot of smaller collaborations to promote startups and entrepreneurship.
Still, members of Brookings made clear in the report that in a world where the federal government is dysfunctional and the state has been absent, cities like Philly have to be more creative, make the most of their own institutions and collaborate in more innovative ways.
Other report recommendations included developing an Anchor Firm Entrepreneurship Initiative that would use the resources of anchor technology firms to strengthen the region’s startup landscape. The goal would be to connect the city’s startups with customers, support training and mentorship programs, boost access to investment, and help develop physical spaces in which startups can grow.
Education that would zero in on skills needed to foster local talent in support of the anchor industries would be designed to ensure that city residents in a wider number of communities were positioned to benefit from precision medicine and other technology jobs.
Photo: SeanPavonePhoto, Getty Images
