North Carolina's biotech sector was expanding more than twice as fast as the national growth rate when the recession hit. It remains to be seen whether the sector can resume that healthy pace as the battered regional economy recovers.
A report released Monday from Battelle Memorial Institute, a research group in Columbus, Ohio, stops at 2008 in comparing how the nation's 39 biotech hubs fared in their efforts to attract high-paying jobs.
North Carolina's biotech sector, largely concentrated in the Triangle, added 2,000 jobs between 2007 and 2008. It grew at a rate of 3.7 percent when the national growth rate was 1.4 percent, said Mitch Horowitz, a Battelle vice president and managing director.
Horowitz said that detailed biotech employment statistics for 2009 will be released later this year but that North Carolina's industry will emerge poised to expand.
Though Glaxo Smith Kline and other companies that sell pharmaceuticals have shed hundreds of workers, the region has gained in sectors such as agriculture-science as companies such as Bayer Crop Science continue to hire.
The study, conducted by Battelle and the industry group BIO, said the biotech sector gained 19,000 jobs nationally in 2008, even as 50 publicly traded companies went bankrupt.
Jobs in drugs and pharmaceuticals, the only major category within biotech that saw declines, dropped 2.3 percent nationwide and in North Carolina, Horowitz said.
Details for 2009 will give a clearer picture showing how much lost ground this region will have to recover. Indications are that last year was not an easy one for the biotech sector.
The report analyzes 2009 financial activity and shows that venture capital to biotech companies dropped 36.7 percent between 2008 and 2009.
The analysis also shows that funding from the National Institutes of Health dropped 7.5 percent between 2008 and 2009, a difference that was made up by stimulus funding.
"A key question in light of current federal budget woes is what happens after the recession," the report says.
In 2008, the Triangle accounted for nearly 11,000 drug and pharmaceutical jobs, paying about $75,000 a year on average.
The region had nearly 13,000 research and testing jobs, paying about $76,000 on average.
