FLORIDA STAGNATES IN BIOTECH REPORT
BYLINE: By STEPHEN POUNDS Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
DATELINE: BOSTON
Ernst & Young issued a report to the biotechnology community Tuesday that unceremoniously lumped Florida in with the rest of the Southeast in its annual gauge of the life-science industry's growth around the country.
The New York-based accounting and consulting firm gave Florida a big boost at last year's Biotechnology Industry Organization convention in Chicago when the Sunshine State broke into the top 10 among states based on the number of biotech companies.
But at this year's BIO convention in Boston, Ernst & Young assessed the state of the industry by the number of publicly traded companies. Major biotech clusters led the list, followed by individual states and then regions.
The top three spots were taken by San Francisco, New England and San Diego, with 69, 60 and 38 public companies, respectively.
New Jersey was fourth on the list, with 28 firms, followed by the Mid-Atlantic region with 23 companies.
Then the Southeast, including Florida, chimed in at sixth place with 19. That's the same number as last year. The listing excluded North Carolina - which has nine public biotech companies - with its established cluster at Research Triangle Park.
The ranking would have been weighted heavily toward the established biotech clusters anyway. But by measuring public companies, Ernst & Young gave them even greater emphasis at the expense of emerging areas such as the Southeast and states such as Florida.
"There's not nearly as many IPOs as we used to see," said BioFlorida President Russell Allen. "It's now more M&A," he added, referring to the trend of large drug companies buying smaller, innovative biotech firms.
In fact, Florida's biotech growth has been mainly startups that are barely in the development stage.
"The key, particularly with public companies, is that it's a long-term strategy. You start with an idea (for a new drug) and build around that idea to where it becomes a cure," said David Gury, a member of the Scripps Florida Funding Corp. and former chief executive of Boca Raton drugmaker Nabi Biopharmaceuticals.
"In Florida, there just hasn't been enough time," he said.
Brian Hutchison, chief executive of Regeneration Technologies (Nasdaq: RTIX, $8.75), a publicly traded biotech company in Alachua, said most private firms are just trying to snag investors and aren't even considering going public.
"I know many would like to. They're having trouble getting funding," Hutchison said.
"Investors like to invest in things they understand, like devices. With science, it takes a bit longer to see how it works and to see the profits and cash flow because that's why they make their investments."