Countless medicines of tomorrow are being developed right here today — many in Montgomery County, among the country’s top life sciences hubs.
Here’s a look at three potential medical breakthroughs now in development at some of the region’s bioscience firms, how they got there and what to expect next.
Local life sciences, at a glance
Greater Washington and Baltimore combined to be the fifth-largest life science employment cluster in the United States, with roughly 75,000 in the workforce as of the second quarter of 2022, according to an April 2023 CBRE research report. The regions above it: San Francisco Bay Area, Boston/Cambridge, New Jersey and San Diego.
Other Washington/Baltimore numbers of note from CBRE’s 2023 U.S. Life Sciences Outlook:
- 49% of the D.C./Baltimore region's life sciences employment was in R&D
- 16.2% life sciences employment growth between 2019 and Q2 2022
- 12.6 million square feet of lab inventory as of Q4 2022 and only 1.7% vacancy, lowest in the nation among top markets
- 46 biomanufacturing facilities totaling 3.3 million square feet, vacancy rate of 12.2%
The Big Number
$2.9 billion
Total National Institutes of Health funding for the Washington/Baltimore region in fiscal 2022, $839.9 million of which went to Johns Hopkins University. Leidos Biomedical Research collected $625.1 million and the University of Maryland $224.1 million, per NIH.
At the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, a genomics research institute, Sanjay Vashee oversees a project that would deploy a synthetic version of the Herpes simplex virus (HSV-1) to treat colorectal cancer. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning developed through a partnership with Gaithersburg “digital biopharmaceutical” company BullFrog AI Holdings Inc., which is also helping fund this work, this still-early effort involves creating a particle that will target cancer cells with precision.
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