Mass. biotech firms face labor crunch
Wanted: Biotech workers.
Twenty years ago, that phrase would have been music to Bay State economic development officials’ ears. But now that the life sciences community in the state is getting into hiring mode, the concern expressed by those in the companies themselves is whether they’ll be able to find enough of those workers in Massachusetts.
Charles River Laboratories, which employs about 350 at its Worcester campus, has plans to build a 400,000 square foot facility in Shrewsbury, move the Worcester workers there, and bring its staffing level to 800 by 2008. Saying that’s "just a start," Stephen Cornell, director of Charles River Labs, says the firm will also be looking to build co-op programs at the site with area companies and academic institutions.Novartis, which already has 1,000 employees in Cambridge, is also on a hiring track. The $28-billion international company, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, is a product of the merger of Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy. It already employs 81,400 people in 140 countries and has been hiring two employees a day every day for three years. It, too, says the ability to develop collaborations is what brought it to Massachusetts. Novartis’ Darrell Ricke says the company will need new tools, assays and data management — and it’s looking to add statistics to the training course of life science students, to ensure that they know how to set up a valid statistical experiment.
A much smaller company, Biovest International, is also getting ready to add to its staff in preparation for a product launch at or by 2008. Based in the Biotech Park, Biovest, a public company that’s a subsidiary of Accentia Biopharmaceuticals Inc., has hit a milestone in human clinicals with its personalized anti-cancer vaccine, BiovaxID. The therapeutic has yielded an 89 percent survival rate in mantle cell lymphoma patients after 3.8 years — a patient group that historically has a 50 percent chance of surviving 3 years and a 20 percent chance of surviving 5 years. The vaccine is unique to each patient.
Biovest COO Carl Cohen PhD says that uniqueness presents his company’s biggest hiring challenge. Currently, the company makes all its vaccines for its clinical trials in Worcester. It doesn’t need scientists or research associates as much as it needs Quality Assurance/ Quality Control personnel, because each individual patient medication needs its own set of procedures and documentation. Trained QA/QC personnel earn entry-level salaries in the mid to high $30,000 range, and directors and managers "tend to do very well."
But, he says, when Biovest expands, it may look outside the state because of Massachusetts’ lack of incentives relative to other states — or even, other counties in other states. When the product launches worldwide, Biovest may look to the European Union or, possibly, Ireland.
"It’s not just about employing all the PhDs," said U.S. Congressman James McGovern (D-Worcester), who served as keynote speaker at a March 21 Biotechnology and Bioengineering Corporate forum at WPI. "There’s a manufacturing component to this. How do we regain some of the job base we’ve lost?" Saying he’s constantly running into unemployed former high-tech workers, and that Asia is much more aggressive in terms of training life science workers than the U.S., he characterized the funding climate in Washington DC as "awful." To keep college-educated workers from continuing to leave the state as they have for the last two years, he says, will require significant investment in training. "We need to marry [Massachusetts jobs} to the intellectual base," he said.
Christina P. O’Neill can be reached at coneill@wbjournal.com
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