Connecticut looks to shed ‘white picket fence, stone wall’ image as it promotes life science industry

A decade after Connecticut made its initial push to develop a life science sector, businesses, university partners and the state are looking to develop new ways to market the $6 billion industry.

First, promoters want to change the state’s image as a 1950s suburban enclave.

The opposite is the case, speakers said recently at the Yale Innovation Summit in New Haven. Connecticut’s shoreline is instead seen as a multiethnic hub that offers researchers and entrepreneurs a rare opportunity to market the region as singularly effective in medical and pharmaceutical research and testing.

“I think we still have work to do on changing the perception of Connecticut as sort of white picket fences and stone walls,” said Peter Denious, chief executive officer of AdvanceCT, which seeks to recruit and keep business in Connecticut. “Boston, it’s unbelievably competitive. Our market is not nearly as saturated.

“I think we’re just getting started.”

Gov. Ned Lamont said business executives tell him they want vibrant urban downtowns to attract a workforce of “20-somethings.”

“We have a reputation that we’re not that diverse, and really nice little houses in the suburb and you get a little older and you’ve got 1.8 kids, then you move out there to an acre of land,” he said. “And that wasn’t working anymore in this day and age.”

Promoters of Connecticut’s life science industry point to other benefits. Despite complaints about the cost of doing business and living in Connecticut, the state can sell itself as below the stratospheric costs of urban centers such as Boston and San Francisco.

And further development of Tweed New Haven Airport will provide more links to investors, researchers and entrepreneurs.

New Haven the ‘most like America’

The region’s diverse population could also play a role promoting the life science industry. David Rosenthal, adjunct professor at the Yale School of Medicine and chief medical officer at Tesseract Health Inc., a Guilford health technology company, cited six-year-old data touting New Haven as demographically representative of the United States as a rare marketing opportunity.

By age, educational attainment and race and ethnicity, the New Haven-Milford region is the “most like America” among U.S. cities, Jed Kolko, under secretary of commerce for economic affairs, said in a 2016 analysis of Census and other data and published by Five Thirty Eight.

“There are lots of reasons to care deeply about places that are demographically different from today’s America,” Kolko wrote. “Some of those places may turn out to be bellwethers for a future America that will be older, more educated and more racially and ethnically diverse than today; and some of those places are especially deserving of public attention and investment because they’re worse off than most other places.”

Rosenthal said the New Haven-to-Milford region’s life science community can market itself as the home of a diverse population that gives medical specialists numerous opportunities for clinical testing and research.

“We have a richness here that is unlike Boston, unlike New York, unlike San Francisco,” he told participants at the Yale forum.

In an interview, Rosenthal said the state and others with a stake in Connecticut’s life science industry have not publicized the importance of the region’s diverse population to medical research. For example, he said, some pulse oximeters that measure oxygen levels in the blood can fail to accurately measure low oxygen levels among Black people. A study has shown this can delay proper treatment.

And hospitals can calculate kidney functions differently because a system bias was built into an algorithm, Rosenthal said.

“It matters to have a diverse sample size in research,” he said. “You might (otherwise) make inequalities worse.”

Capping pharma prices ‘anathema’ to the industry

A report by AdvanceCT says life science establishments in Connecticut number 1,000, support 23,600 jobs and generate $6 billion in economic output. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology venture capital funding in 2021 was $700 million, more than double the amount in 2019.

Paul Pescatello, executive director of the Connecticut Bioscience Growth Council of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association, said the state has done a good job promoting bioscience industry growth. But legislation that proposed capping pharmaceutical prices would have undermined those efforts, he said.

The legislation, which critics said would have undermined innovation by hindering drug companies from recouping investments, failed to advance in the legislature before it adjourned May 4.

“If you’re trying to attract an industry, why would you push a policy that’s anathema to them?” Pescatello said. “You’re working against yourself in marketing the state.”

State Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford and co-chair of the legislature’s Bioscience Caucus, said pharmaceutical companies expressed “concerns,” but lawmakers also hear from consumers who are struggling with costly drugs.

“It’s always a balance,” she said.

Bringing Jackson Lab to Connecticut

Elected officials, entrepreneurs and others pulled levers of government, private investment and health care and research institutions to establish a life science industry in Connecticut.

Then-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy brought Jackson Laboratory, a Maine research center focusing on the genome — the set of genes or genetic material in a cell or organ — to Farmington in 2012 to draw high-skill, well-paid jobs to the state. The General Assembly has established a $200 million Bioscience Innovation Fund to foster innovation in smaller companies, and investor tax credits were enacted into law.

In addition, Connecticut Innovations, the state’s venture capital fund, has invested about $129 million in more than 80 companies and projects with $1.7 billion leveraged in New Haven County health care companies since 2012, said Lauren Carmody, vice president of marketing and communications.

And researchers and entrepreneurs in shoreline communities and New Haven have spun off numerous life science businesses from work at Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital.

The industry’s presence in Connecticut is “fairly new” but has grown quickly, Cohen said, with more than two dozen bioscience companies operating just in Branford.

“We witnessed an overcrowding of bubbles like Cambridge and people started to look for new places to settle in,” she said.

Stephen Singer can be reached at ssinger@courant.com.