Underscoring the strength of the life science industry powering developments in Cambridge, Worcester, Boston and beyond, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council said that the Massachusetts biopharma industry raised $2.1 billion in venture capital investment in the first half of 2020.
The statistics were included in the group’s annual Industry Snapshot report.
Through all of 2019, VC investment in Massachusetts biopharma companies reached $3.1 billion, a decline from a record-setting 2018. The IPO market also remained strong, MassBio said, with seven IPOs from Massachusetts biotech companies in the first half of 2020, making up 33 percent of all US-based biotech IPOs, and raising an average of $187 million. There were 10 biotech IPOs from Massachusetts companies in 2019, accounting for 23 percent of all US-based biotech IPOs. Of those biotech IPOs, 64 percent were located outside of Cambridge, raising a cumulative $676 million – a positive trend for the industry.
“In 2019, we saw some of the most severe legislation around drug pricing for the industry, both in Massachusetts and federally, which led to a decline in investment as we predicted it would,” MassBio President and CEO Robert K. Coughlin said in a statement. “The COVID-19 pandemic has since upended our country’s economy, put a spotlight on the true value of the biopharma industry in addressing a human health crisis, and created a better understanding of just how difficult it is to develop a therapy or vaccine. It’s also made clear the outsized role Massachusetts life sciences companies are playing in the pandemic, with over 85 companies here working on tests, treatments, or vaccines, many of which are small to mid-sized biotechs that make up the backbone of our cluster and the majority of MassBio membership.”
Massachusetts remains a center of research and development activity, the industry said, with biotech R&D jobs reaching 46,000 in 2019, an increase of 18 percent from 2018. Industry jobs as a whole reached nearly 80,000 in 2019, the largest year-over-year growth since 2007, and a 94 percent increase in the last 15 years.
