The following is an excerpt from a Boston Globe article originally published on August 27, 2024:
Massachusetts’ biopharmaceutical industry added fewer than 3,000 jobs last year, its smallest increase in total employment in seven years, according to a report Tuesday by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council.
Despite economic headwinds and widely reported layoffs, the sector still added 2,943 jobs, said the annual “industry snapshot” by the trade group. The 2.6 percent increase raised the total number of biopharma employees to 116,937.
It was the smallest expansion since 2017, when the sector added 2,895 jobs, a 4.3 percent increase over the previous year’s total of 67,046 jobs.
Ben Bradford, MassBio’s head of external affairs, attributed the modest expansion to the makeup of the state’s biopharma sector.
While 18 of the world’s 20 largest drugmakers have a presence in Massachusetts — including such pharmaceutical giants as Pfizer, Novartis, and Eli Lilly & Co. — the sector is “hugely comprised” of small, growing startups that aren’t making money yet and rely on venture capital to operate, he said.
Still, biotechnology remains a driving force for the Massachusetts economy. The industry accounted for nearly 17 percent of job growth in the state, even though biopharma comprises only 3.7 percent of the workforce.
In some ways, the sector has raised unrealistic expectations, given how it exploded in the early years of the pandemic. The state’s biopharmaceutical workforce grew by a staggering 22,383 employees from 2020 to 2021, or by nearly 27 percent, to 106,679 workers.
Likewise, venture funding skyrocketed early in the pandemic. In 2021, Massachusetts startups received an astonishing $13.66 billion in venture funding as exuberant investors disregarded the high failure rate in drug development and bet on buzzy technologies such as gene editing and messenger RNA vaccines.
Bradford said those years were outliers; the sector attracted many “generalist” investors who were enticed by the success of firms such as Moderna, the Cambridge-based maker of a leading COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna went from being unknown by most of the public to “being in global headlines on a daily basis,” he said.