Originally published in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette on May 11, 2022
WORCESTER — The city’s burgeoning biotech and life sciences industries are gaining momentum, or, as Jon Weaver and his peers at Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives call it, “Woo-mentum.”
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MassBio President and CEO Kendalle Burlin O’Connell said Worcester’s biotech industry and Boston’s are “absolutely collaborative.”
Burlin O’Connell is the first woman leader at MassBio, an nonprofit organization dedicated to growing and advancing Massachusetts’ life sciences industry with more than 1,500 members.
She said when she started working at MassBio in 2008, the industry was anchored in Cambridge and Boston. Now as the industry sprawls across the state, Burlin O’Connell said she’s excited to have conversations about the growth seen in cities like Worcester.
“Worcester is already one of the biggest biotech hubs in Massachusetts, and one of the premier life science clusters in the nation,” she said. “This is because of decades of investment through public-private partnership, and this collaboration happening between the Worcester (Regional Chamber of Commerce), MBI and academia to really prioritize life science as an industry for economic development recruitment.”