Wisconsin bioscience companies and researchers are rallying behind a recent study which revealed the industry generated $27 billion in economic output and filled 105,000 direct and indirect jobs in 2013.
Members of Bioforward, an association composed of representatives from leading Wisconsin bioscience companies, claimed that a lack of marketing has caused the industry to be overlooked on the national scale at a summit this month.
The summit featured a panel with with Kevin Conroy, Exact Sciences CEO, James Dias, Welbe CEO, Matt Jennings, Phillips-Medisize Corporation CEO and Cynthia Laconte, Dohmen Company CEO, and was designed to spark collaboration between some of the industry’s front-runners.
They discussed developing a joint message to expand Wisconsin’s appeal to investors and young talent.
“We need a single voice and that is not going to happen with two or three people sitting in an office and it’s not going to happen with 10 more sitting on a board,” Laconte said.
Laconte said every single person interested in seeing life sciences “become a force to be reckoned with” in the state is becoming involved.
In addition, Conroy said Wisconsin is projected to experience a doubling of its over-retirement age population in the next 18 years. Jennings said the rapid aging of Wisconsin will enable continued growth in the bioscience industry since there will be more people in need of medical care.
With such a large increase in the number of Wisconsin citizens out of the workforce, the bioscience industry will suffer from a shortage of qualified workers. Conroy said this future problem is a driving force behind the plan to aggressively market for the Wisconsin bioscience industry.
“I think that it is really important to note that with the aging demographic in Wisconsin, there is going to become a huge gap between the number of jobs that are available and the number of people trained and skilled to use them,” Conroy said.
Chad Vezina, UW comparative biosciences researcher, said his research is focused on better understanding why people and some animals have problems with urination as they age, with a long term goal to develop more appropriate therapies. He said UW bioscience research as a whole has a “unique early role” in developing the “next generation” of therapies which could improve human lives.
Vezina said his research could be the basis for the next startup company, the next device manufacturing or the next candidate drug, but it falls short of receiving public appreciation because of a lack of advertising. He said he and some researchers are “isolated” on campus and it has led to a lack of understanding of the importance of their research.
Vezina said part of the budget reduction to UW and the UW System could be because researchers are not meeting their full responsibilities to address the Wisconsin Idea.
“I think we are providing the state with a benefit, but the people of Wisconsin don’t recognize that because the word is not getting out, because people like me are locked in laboratories and not interacting with the rest of the public,” Vezina said.
Masatoshi Suzuki, a comparative biosciences professor, said in an email to The Badger Herald that new findings from UW research functions as “seeds” for new Wisconsin businesses. Suzuki said an increase in state funding to the bioscience industry would be a “win-win” for both the state economy and members of the bioscience community.
