Insiders reveal how Boston moved to the forefront of the global fight against deadly diseases

Gritstone

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Boston is undoubtedly the place to be if you want to go into biotech.

Along with San Francisco, the Boston area was where biotech as an industry had its roots. In the 1980s and 1990s, the industry started gaining traction, with companies moving into Cambridge to set up shop.

The metro area is home to almost 1,000 biotechnology companies —from the earliest startups, to $50 billion companies — academic centers, and life science organizations.

Boston has been home to major developments in how we treat cancer, therapies to tackle rare genetic diseases, and research for cutting-edge technologies like the gene-editing tool CRISPR.

Despite $1 billion+ investments in New York and other efforts to spark the industry, there’s something missing there that Boston seems to have. With that in mind, when Business Insider recently visited the city, we asked locals: What’s the “special sauce” that makes the Boston area such a hub for drug discovery and development?

Here’s what we found.

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The science

With Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the number of other institutions in the metro area, Boston has no shortage of scientific research happening. Even for a pharmaceutical company with operations around the world like Sanofi, there’s something noteworthy happening in the area.

“Boston for some reason is a hub of science. It’s probably like no other place that I know actually,” said Harry Kleanthous, the US head of research for Sanofi Pasteur.

The medical institutions

Steven Holtzman, CEO of Decibel Therapeutics, said that when he was working for a company called Millenium Pharmaceuticals in the 1990s, the team was trying to decide where to set up shop. It came down to San Francisco and Boston.

“What we said was that proximity to cutting edge university basic research was necessary but it was not going to be sufficient going forward,” he said. “What you really needed to do was hook into the medical establishment as well, because we were beginning to understand the role of the patient.”

That put Boston in the lead, with medical schools situated near institutions like Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“There’s a greater biomedical establishment here,” Holtzman said. “That was the key tipping point.”

The people

People can be fairly particular about where they want to live, so if you’re looking to recruit for a new startup, having a presence in the Boston area is a key move.

“What seems to happen is that people in Boston don’t want to move to California, people in California don’t want to move to Boston,” Matt Hawryluk, chief business officer at Gritstone Oncology said. Gritstone has offices in the Bay Area as well, so they’re able to recuit folks from both coasts without making anyone move.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider