Six Key Takeaways from the Maryland Life Sciences Bio Innovation Conference
If there was one moment that encapsulated the audacity and innovation happening in the Maryland Life Sciences community, it was when Kite’s David Anderson described the material they work with at their Fredericksburg manufacturing facility.
“Those are someone’s cells in your hands,” he said, referring to Kite’s cell therapy process for using genetically modified immune cells to transform cancer treatment. “That material is precious.”
Leaders from Kite, MaxCyte, Novavax, and dozens of other companies came together in person for the first time in more than two years to learn from one another and build a stronger life sciences community in Maryland and the broader DMV region. Here are our top takeaways from the hybrid event, which also garnered more than 3,300 participants online.
1. The BioHealth Capital Region is thriving.
In the opening session, Martin Rosendale, Chief Executive Officer of Maryland Life Sciences, announced a new Milken Institute report concluding that “Maryland has one of the nation’s strongest life sciences industries” in the nation. The report said the state’s array of universities, federal labs, and biohealth firms contributed to 54,000 jobs, breakthrough medical research discoveries, and “a range of technologies that have been key to the COVID-19 pandemic response.” Despite these accolades, the region does have challenges attracting enough life sciences talent to meet the workforce demand, as well as venture capital to enhance Maryland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
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2. We need more life sciences talent.
If you took a stroll through the virtual exhibit hall, you likely came across an invitation to “Join Our Team” or “Explore Careers at [Company XYZ].” Maryland’s R&D employment grew 7.4% from 2015–2020 and manufacturing employment expanded a whopping 30.7% during the same period. Keeping pace with this accelerating demand will require investment in the talent pipeline, as well as continued momentum to attract top life sciences companies to the region.
Joe Sanchez, Director of Science Engagement & STEM Programming for AstraZeneca, said Maryland must do a better job of marketing job opportunities to untapped talent pools across industry sectors.
“The biopharmaceutical industry has just stepped up to save the world from a horrible pandemic,” said Sanchez. “Now is the time to out-hustle all the other industries to win the hearts and minds of people.”
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3. The Washington, DC region is the epicenter of pandemic preparedness.
This summer, Connected DMV announced the formal launch of a Global Pandemic Prevention and Biodefense Center, a $2.5 billion project bringing together dozens of cross-sector leaders focused on developing human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to treat the world’s top 100 pathogens. That effort involves 70 federal labs, 800 life sciences companies, and Federal agency engagement from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
Gary Disbrow, Deputy Assistant Director for Preparedness and Response at BARDA, emphasized the importance of taking lessons learned from the current crisis to position ourselves for future pandemics. Together with Johnson & Johnson’s JLABs, BARDA launched Blue Knight to stimulate and accelerate innovation to improve global health security. Disbrow said we must make significant infrastructure investments in early detection, vaccines, diagnostics, and “threat-agnostic therapeutics” to mitigate future pandemics.
Melanie Saville, Director of R&D for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation, punctuated Disbrow’s remarks when she reminded the audience that, “COVID is not the worst-case scenario.” Saville explained that COVID is “actually pretty low on the severity index” compared with other potential pathogens. Fortunately, modern research has drastically reduced the time it takes to get from pathogen identification to vaccine development. It took almost three decades to develop a vaccine for typhoid fever and 20 years to develop the polio vaccine, but the FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations for three licensed vaccines less than a year after the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen was identified.
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4. Maryland is breaking barriers to advance cell and gene therapy.
Curing cancer. Erasing the burden of debilitating autoimmune and genetic disorders. Saving and transforming lives through revolutionary innovation.
Cell and gene therapies are the frontier of medical research and development, and the pioneers driving this revolution have found a home in Maryland. From Kite’s new 20-acre chimeric antigen rector T (CAR T) manufacturing facility to RoosterBio’s human mesenchymal stem/stromal cell (hMSC) technology, biotech companies are establishing roots in the BioHealth Capital Region to realize the promise of cell-based medicine.
“Innovation is the ability to pivot — that’s what this biohealth hub does,” said Jim Jackson, Vice President of Manufacturing at Kite. “Frederick County has been absolutely amazing to help us establish this unique facility.”
Additional MD biotech companies on the frontline of gene and cell therapy include:
- Vigene Biosciences, providing viral vector-based gene delivery solutions for research and clinical applications
- Cartesian Therapeutics, engineering cells with RNA to overcome the limitations of conventional cell engineering
- MaxCyte, driving a new generation of cell-based medicines through its Flow Electroporation® Technology
- Carisma Therapeutics, pioneering the development of CAR macrophages, a disruptive approach to immunotherapy
- RegenXBio, delivering genes to cells using adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors
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5. Health equity is an R&D imperative.
“It’s time for medicine and society to take the step around the corner and go in a different direction,” said Dr. Lisa Dunkle, Vice President of Clinical Development and Global Medical Lead at Novavax. “We are all members of the human race, and nothing else matters.”
Dr. Dunkle joined Matthew Hepburn, Director of COVID Vaccine Development and HHS-DoD Countermeasures, and Stephen Thomas, Director for the Maryland Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland, to address the unfathomable costs of vaccine hesitancy in America and the grassroots solutions that are saving lives.
“Hesitancy does not mean never,” said Thomas, who founded Shots at the Shop to engage 1,000 Black-owned barbershops and hair salons nationwide to promote COVID-19 vaccinations. He said patrons who come to the shops leave “hesitant but vaccinated,” and the key to getting shots in arms is relationships.
Beyond the grassroots community efforts to overcome current hesitancy, leaders from Pfizer, Novavax, GSK, and Vaccitech discussed the imperative for research transparency and seamless and adaptive clinical trials to increase vaccine confidence and accelerate discovery and innovation.
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6. We cannot and will not go back to normal.
From the unprecedented cross-industry, multi-sector collaboration that enabled the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines to breakthroughs in health equity and new paradigms for vaccine administration, the MD Life Sciences community expressed consensus on one key axiom: “We cannot go back to normal.”
According to the World Economic Forum, COVID has cost $11 trillion for the global economy, a fraction of which could have predicted and prevented this historic disaster. While continuing to research and develop vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for the current pandemic, the life sciences community is mobilizing to prevent future catastrophes.
But the paradigm shift extends beyond infectious diseases and biomedical attacks; industry disruption over the last 18 months has accelerated our journey toward healthcare of the future.
“We have never had a time in the world where things happen this quickly,” said Dr. David Angus, Chief Executive Officer of the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine and CBS Medical Contributor. Angus discussed shifts in cloud and data modernization, personalized medicine, and value-based care that will impact the trajectory of healthcare in coming years. He said we will begin to see a big liberation of data that will enable things to happen an “order of magnitude quicker” than they occur today.
“We have to enter a new era where data collection happens first, and then you go to the doctor’s office and have a conversation,” Angus said. “This is a new world.”
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Meet the Authors:
Jacque Myers is Healthcare and Life Sciences lead at Slalom DC. Working to create a community and a world where every person can live their life as healthy as possible. Find her here on LinkedIn.
Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Our healthcare and life sciences industry teams partner with healthcare, biotech and pharmaceutical leaders to strengthen their organizations, improve their systems, and help with some of their most strategic business challenges. Find out more about our people, our company and what we do.
