More on Local Biotech: Arizona

First on the ingredients list: local funding. 

They spent months laying the groundwork for a Scottsdale Airpark-based investment bank and advisory firm that they hope will grow with the region's budding biotech industry.

Alare Capital Partners LLC brings together 12 founding partners with backgrounds from pharmaceuticals to mergers and acquisitions to technology licensing. Scientific and business advisory boards add 11 more experts to help generate business leads and provide expertise in technical areas.

"I think it would have been difficult to do two to three to five years ago," Rodgers said of founding the specialty firm in a Valley where other banks didn't last. "There was a sense that there wasn't enough critical mass here, that it was a golf-and-retirement kind of economy. But when TGen (the Translational Genomics Research Institute) and IGC (the International Genomics Consortium) came, that changed everything. It put Arizona on the map."

A lot of local governments like the externalities of biotech but don't always appreciate the role those apparent externalities played in growing biotech in the first place.  For Arizona this is certainly a step in the right direction.  See this older article:

Now California and the Boston metropolitan area are home to almost all of the few venture capital firms with expertise in funding biotechnology startups. And that, Royston said, poses a problem for the cities in between that are striving to develop their own biotech clusters.

"There's plenty of money out there, but not enough of the kind of venture capital that starts a company," Royston said.

About a year ago, a group from the University of Pittsburgh met with Royston to pitch its idea of spinning off a scientific discovery into a startup biotech company.

"I loved the technology," Royston said. "But in the end, I told them that it was going to require a lot of hands-on work by experienced investors to start the company. I told them to find someone in Pittsburgh to help. I told them that if they were in San Diego, it would be a different story.