Business Development

Toward the Creation of 10,000+ Jobs Across the Commonwealth

This past June, the MLSC proudly represented the Commonwealth of Massachusetts at the first in-person BIO International Convention since before the pandemic in 2019. With our partners at MassBio and industry and academic leaders, the State of Possible booth welcomed roughly 1,100-plus attendees to learn why Massachusetts has the number one thriving life sciences ecosystem. Over a three-day span, the booth held five panel discussions including the announcement of the MLSC’s 2022 Tax Incentive awardees.

President and CEO, Kenn Turner, announced $24.2 million in tax incentive awards to 36 life sciences companies, expecting to create 1,581 new life sciences industry jobs in the Commonwealth. The Tax Incentive program is offered to companies engaged in life sciences research and development, commercialization, and manufacturing in Massachusetts, providing incentives to companies of all sizes looking to expand their efforts by creating new, long-term jobs in Massachusetts.

Out of the 36 companies receiving tax incentive awards, 28 companies—accounting for 77 percent of the new jobs—are expanding

outside of Boston and Cambridge. Since the MLSC’s reauthorization in 2018, 80 percent of jobs committed through the MLSC’s Tax Incentive program are located outside of Boston and Cambridge. Since the Center’s inception, life sciences companies expanding across Massachusetts have committed to the creation of more than 10,000 jobs through this program.

The Commonwealth must maintain its competitive advantages as a global leader in the life sciences and these investments demonstrates Massachusetts leadership in accelerating companies’ ability locate and expand here in our Commonwealth.”

Administration and Finance Secretary Michael J. Heffernan and MLSC Board Co-Chair

The Return of the Ribbon Cutting:
A Year to Remember in Expansions and Growth

If you blinked this past fiscal year, you may have missed an announcement from a major Massachusetts life sciences employer celebrating new expansions, increased job growth, and advancements to improve patient outcomes. As everyone aimed to return to safe in-person events, the fiscal year offered a number of opportunities to celebrate Massachusetts companies continuing their growth trajectory.

Soon after it went public via a SPAC deal valued at $17.5 billion, Ginkgo Bioworks announced plans to expand its presence at a new Seaport lab building with plans to fully occupy a new 219,000-square-foot life-sciences building at the former Au Bon Pain headquarters.

In February 2022, Eli Lilly and Company announced the launch of the Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine and an investment of approximately $700 million to establish a state-of-the-art facility at a new site in the Boston Seaport. This investment is part of the company's strategy to advance RNA based therapeutics.

This expansion is a sign of our deep commitment to Boston and the larger Massachusetts innovation ecosystem."

Jeffrey Leiden, M.D., Ph.D.,
Executive Chairman at Vertex

In May 2022, Vertex Pharmaceuticals announced plans to build another 344,000 square foot facility in the Seaport to support the company’s continued rapid growth, in particular the expansion of its cell and genetic therapies programs. According to the company, by 2025 Vertex will occupy 1.9 million square feet of real estate in the Seaport across five sites.

This past June, Takeda signed a 15-year lease with BioMed Realty for an approximately 600,000 square feet state-of-the-art facility, enabling the company to create a purpose-built R&D facility with laboratories of the future featuring modern design elements and upgraded technology to support the company in its efforts to advance innovation for patients.

This is in addition to earlier this year when BioLife Plasma Services, part of Takeda, announced the opening of a new plasma center in the communities of Worcester and Medford, to help meet the urgent and growing demand for therapies developed from plasma.

Also in June, Sanofi announced the opening of the company's new campus at Cambridge Crossing. The campus, consisting of two buildings totaling 900,000 square feet, is designed to enhance collaboration between R&D, Medical, and the Specialty Care business unit, among others, to accelerate the development of transformative treatments for patients.

Bayer AG also celebrated the opening of its new Research and Innovation Center at Kendall Square. The 62,100-square-foot facility houses a new center of precision molecular oncology research equipped with state-of-the-art laboratories and offices for the development of novel targeted cancer therapies for patients.

Even immediately following the close of the fiscal year Servier, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and CRISPR Therapeutics celebrated significant expansions, from Boston to Plainville.

Angel Momentum:
Programming Continuing to Spur Early-Stage Funding

This past fiscal year, the MLSC continued to offer its Angel Investor Tax Credit program to investors interested in funding early-stage companies engaged in life sciences research and development, commercialization, and manufacturing in Massachusetts. The program provides a taxpayer investor a credit of 20 percent of the qualifying investment, or 30 percent if the business is located in a gateway municipality, in a business that has no more than $500,000 in gross revenues in the year prior to eligibility.

Credits are available up to $50,000 in any one taxable year for qualifying investments of up to $125,000 per qualifying business per year and up to $250,000 in cumulative qualifying investments for each qualifying business.

To ensure the Massachusetts’ ecosystem remains favorable for investors, we are proud to offer this new Angel Investor Tax Credit to encourage investment throughout the Commonwealth and in our gateway municipalities. We are confident that such investments will create jobs, build a robust workforce, support women and minority-led companies, and propel the development of new

therapies, devices, and scientific advancements that are improving patient health and well-being.

Leveraging nearly $450,000 of Center investment, 96 angel investors made $2.9 million in investment to 19 Massachusetts companies. A distinct benefit of the program is that many of the companies receiving angel investment are enterprises located in MLSC-funded incubators, including Mansfield Bio-Incubator and North Shore InnoVentures, and have benefitted from additional MLSC programming.

For Dan Deardorf, CEO of Glycologix, he most certainly saw the program as providing motivation and momentum for angel investors to close in on their investment in his company.

Glycologix operates out of North Shore InnoVentures in Beverly, MA and is a user of the MLSC Internship Challenge. Dan and his team are developing a biopolymer platform for the protection and repair of soft tissues with a current focus on Interstitial Cystitis/Bladder Pain Syndrome (IC/BPS). A disorder of the bladder, IC/BPS impacts as many as 10 million in the United States, predominantly women, according to the company.

From my perspective, the MLSC Angel Investor Tax Credit program was a strong additional motivator for a subset of our seed round investors. I also believe that the benefits of the program likely led to some investors to increase the size of their investment. Fundraising is often about momentum, and any reason on top of a solid core investment is beneficial to the process."

Dan Deardorf, CEO of Glycologix

A Home-Grown Company Helping Save Lives Every Day

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was one life-saving medical device that was in high demand but in short supply: ventilators. In these early days, ventilators offered patients with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) – the main cause of death among COVID patients – the best chance of survival.

A home-grown Massachusetts company, ZOLL Medical, knew they had the power to help save lives. ZOLL develops a range of emergency-care devices and related software, including products for defibrillation and cardiac monitoring, CPR feedback, circulation enhancement, supersaturated oxygen therapy, and therapeutic temperature management. Ventilators are a relatively small part of its business.

However, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) called in March 2020 to ask ZOLL how many ventilators it could supply, and how quickly it could do so, the company leaped into action.

ZOLL swiftly increased its ventilator production by more than 25 times normal output. Within six months, ZOLL delivered more than 20,000 ventilators to HHS – the single largest order in the company’s history.

The Chelmsford-based company is quick to acknowledge the strength of the Massachusetts ecosystem and the ability to tap into the abundance of resources only a life sciences ecosystem like ours can offer.

ZOLL is a global company with a footprint in more than 140 countries. Yet it all starts at home, as the company

values having their headquarters here in the Commonwealth. It is part of the strong foundation that enables them to continue growing their R&D and manufacturing base.

On the biopharma front, according to MassBio, Middlesex County, which includes Chelmsford, saw impressive employment growth in both manufacturing (15.5 percent) and R&D (17.3 percent) from 2020 to 2021.

“The combination of being close to great schools that encourage intellectual curiosity – including the nearby UMass Lowell and Middlesex Community College – and being an easy drive to world-renowned hospitals and research institutions is powerful,” said Lynn Hersey, head of Corporate Human Resources at ZOLL. “We have access to a talent pool with a work ethic and resiliency that is unmatched.”

Over the past three years, ZOLL has been a recipient of the MLSC Tax Incentive program. In that same three-year span, ZOLL has grown their cumulative headcount by 25 percent in the state and has provided more than 75 internships and co-ops to Massachusetts college students.

Helping Industry Navigate Workforce Needs

Team Massachusetts is made up of several collaborative government agencies, quasi-public entities, and independent nonprofit organizations (MLSC, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, MassDevelopment, MassEcon, Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, MassBio) that work together to meet the needs of the life sciences industry in Massachusetts.

Whether providing talent, advisory or direct capital assistance, the MLSC works as a close partner to our portfolio companies to ensure that they have the resources they need to succeed in Massachusetts.

To that end, the MLSC is excited to share an early version of a new resource of two and four-year academic institutions, vocational technical high schools, and non-profit organizations that provide training opportunities to enhance the talent for life sciences companies throughout Massachusetts.

Our partners are at the ready as trusted advocates with comprehensive knowledge of the Massachusetts economic development landscape, to assist you as you begin to grow your business in Massachusetts.

Instructions

Click on the interactive google map above to enlarge. To learn more about a specific partner and obtain contact information, click on any of the icons.

The dropdown in the top left corner will show a list of all the partner allowing you to filter by one of the categories.

As Companies Grow, Their Talent Must Grow With It

We know life sciences employers are striving through an unprecedented labor market. The success of the life sciences in the Commonwealth and the launch of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center can be tied back to our number one resource—our people. This hallmark of our ecosystem will only continue to strengthen.

Massachusetts has the most prepared, well-educated talent pipeline in the nation with the highest percentage of adults in the nation with a bachelor’s degree or higher, and the highest percentage with an advanced degree. Massachusetts also leads the nation in STEM degrees conferred annually.

.To help meet industry needs, the MLSC and our partners in government are standing up support in: immediate hiring, pipeline programs to address skill gaps, and employer incumbent training.

Immediate hiring: Helping you hire individuals for job openings with candidates available in labor force

Pipeline programs to address skill gaps: Helping you hire individuals with specific credentials not available in labor force today

Employer incumbent training: Helping design and fund company specific training for existing workers

Jeanne LeClair
^{Senior Director of Business Development and Workforce Partnerships}

Jeanne LeClair on Workforce and the Role the MLSC Plays in Driving the Pipeline
"The emphasis I think we place on workforce is two-fold. First, the life science companies in Massachusetts that move innovation forward rely on a talented workforce to do the science, the development, and the manufacturing that keep this industry so dynamic. Second, creating additional opportunities for workers and communities who have not previously been as engaged in the life sciences allows us to bring the whole Commonwealth along as the industry grows and continues to create long-term, meaningful careers that help people—the workers and the patients they serve. We’ve been proud to be able to step up this year and support the workforce pipeline in new creative ways that connect companies directly with training providers and schools, to meet the needs of today and prepare for tomorrow." Connect with Jeanne: Email or LinkedIn