Splice and run

After 15 years, Worcester's biotechnology park hasn't ived up to expectations. Its owners whisper that they might sell. Tenants are moving to Greater Boston. Insiders wonder how Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Park will survive.

by Kristen Lombardi

The Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Park boasts four facilities for scientific research that connect the city to an industry famed for curing the incurable. In the park's brilliant architecture, outsiders see an impressive complex, an opportunity to spark life in the city's faded manufacturing base. Inside, however, much of these facilities is empty due to downsized companies, or firms that have fled to communities closer to Boston -- places biotech executives consider more appealing and accessible to investors, sophisticated personnel, and highbrow educational institutions.

Worcester has spent more than a decade gambling on biotechnology -- a sector known for its short-lived companies -- as an economic savior once expected to bring an additional 4000 jobs and $400 million in private investment to the region. Once a bustling bastion of activity, with more than 20 occupants and $200 million in investment, Biotech Park now seems plagued by tenant turnover and high vacancy. Business at the park has plateaued in the past three years -- if not plummeted.

"Worcester was ahead of the curve in the mid-1980s," says Marc Goldberg, president and chief executive officer of Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Institute, a non-profit group responsible for bringing much of the new technology to Worcester. "We've fallen behind. I'm hopeful our current [effort] will push us ahead."

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Bio market -- A look at other biotech parks

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Regardless of local optimism, park owners have entertained plans to sell because of the major expense of running the complex. Many biotech executives point to Worcester's high taxes and poor investor and personnel pools. Hence the question remains: will the city's gamble on biotechnology dissolve before it can reap the longstanding economic rewards realized elsewhere?

Worcester romances the gene

Although it has blossomed into an industry boasting revenues of $12 billion last year, biotech was simply a word in 1980. The science of manipulating molecules has been practiced for centuries, in everything from beer fermentation to animal breeding. Molecular manipulation took off, however, in the early 1980s with technology. Soon, says Ronald Cheetham, head of biotechnology and biology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, scientists could tweak living organisms in weeks. They could splice genes, string DNA -- they could do things the public regarded as "unnatural."

The commercialization of modern biology became so hot that, in 1981, WPI changed the name of its life-sciences department creating the first college-level biotechnology department.

As with cities around the nation, Worcester officials recognized biotechnology as a potential boom industry -- one that could "succeed" traditional manufacturing, says John Anderson, an at-large city councilor since 1975.

"There was a sense biotechnology was the wave of the future. There was a feeling Worcester had missed out with computer technology," he says. "We thought it would be advantageous to draw [biotech] development here."

In the early 1980s, the health-care industry was the largest employer in Worcester, with the University of Massachusetts Medical Center employing more than 5000 people. The area's 10 institutions of higher education -- in particular WPI -- offered a bustling environment for biomedical research. And the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research -- famous for its birth-control pill -- was a hop away in Shrewsbury.

"It looked like we had the right mixture of things to be attractive," says Anderson.

Officials, in particular the city's Chamber of Commerce, wanted to capitalize on these assets to mold Worcester into a recognizable biotech hub -- at least within Massachusetts. When the state deemed 75 acres of land at Worcester State Hospital as surplus, Worcester Business Development Corporation -- the development arm of the chamber -- acquired the land for an industrial park for fledgling biotech companies. The WBDC proposal for today's Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Park was viewed as the catalyst for growth in biotechnology -- an "industry Worcester needs to boost economic development," officials publicly hailed.

In the early '80s, officials estimated the park would provide 3100 direct jobs and employ another 2100 in support. In Statewide Strategy for Job Creation and Economic Growth 1993, drafted by the Executive Office of Economic Affairs, the city estimated "over 4240 jobs [would be]. . . created as a direct result" of the park, along with $455 million in private investment.

That biotech firms manufacture their futuristic in the region seemed equally important to leaders as research companies settling here. Manufacturing, of course, would provide jobs extending beyond the high-tech scientist with an advanced degree.

"The real job growth is in the manufacturing phase," William Short, president of the Worcester Area Chamber of Commerce, told the Phoenix in 1993.

Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Park got off to an enviable start. Business leaders set up a non-profit organization known as Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Institute to bolster the industry -- while WBDC worked on constructing the center off Plantation Street. MBRI strove to manage the "technology transfer" process that turns scientific research into products. It established a now-defunct venture-capital fund -- Commonwealth Bioventures Inc. -- that raised more than $30 million to help start-up companies before it dissolved nearly two years ago.

"A key draw was the venture-capital fund," says Goldberg, who aims to establish a similar fund this year. "Real money is important. There has been a real gap in activity since that fund [folded due to manager Robert Foster's retirement]."

TSI Corporation, Ecoscience Corporation (both no longer in the park), and Alpha-Beta Technology set up shop at Biotech Park enticed by venture- capital money. By 1991, WBDC operated three buildings, each at least 95 percent occupied. Three years later, BASF Bioresearch Corporation completed its $100 million, 250,000-square-foot building that employs about 250 people. Four Biotech also opened its doors, allowing for a total of more than 20 companies at the park.

Currently, WBDC owns three of four facilities at Biotech Park -- each averaging about 80,000 square feet. The organization also owns a separate 10,000-square-foot building known as the Magnetic Imaging Center. At only $3 million in public investment, WBDC has realized measurable growth -- most notably, 800,000 square feet of space that adds another $3 million in property taxes to city coffers each year.

"After 13 years of development, the park doesn't look too different from what was originally intended," says Thomas Andrews, the park's new executive director.

Part 2

Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com.