Gov. Charlie Baker saluted innovation and investment in the health care field during his remarks at the 2017 International BIO Conference in San Diego on Wednesday, laying out his plans to invest in workforce development and foster public-private partnerships and thanking those in the medical industry for doing the work they do.
The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, referred to as BIO, represents more than 1,100 biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centers and other organizations in the U.S. and more than 30 other countries. The conference is an opportunity for anyone with a stake in the field to market themselves to more than 16,000 people from 76 countries who attend, according to the organization’s website.
Before leaving for California, Baker proposed a five-year, $500 million plan to extend a $1 billion, 10-year life sciences initiative passed under former Gov. Deval Patrick. With the initial investments winding down, Baker said it is important to look back on the life science industry’s growth every decade.
“Now, politics and public life tends to be something that goes by in a Twitter feed. But if you look at sort of the arc of inquiry and discovery, especially in biotechnology over the course of the past 20 or 30 years, every 10 years or so the game changes dramatically,” Baker said in a statement. “Because it takes place over such a long period of time and people are just paying attention to what happened today, yesterday and tomorrow. For those of you who are in this space, for those of you who play and participate in chasing therapies and cures and possibilities here, it makes an enormous difference to the folks who are living with these illness and these diseases every single day, and I just want to thank you for the work you do on that.”
Baker also said he is looking forward to hosting the 2018 BIO International Convention in Boston next June.
“Twenty-two thousand people came to BIO in Massachusetts when we last hosted it,” he said. “It’s really important to me that it be 22,001 in 2018.”
Baker said he sees great possibility for collaboration between the public and private sectors under his proposed investment plan, which will focus on workforce development to “build the pipeline” to support the biotechnology and life sciences institutions that have set up shop in Massachusetts.
