Greater Philadelphia's Big Pharmas
A Robust Support Infrastructure
Barbara Schilberg: Champion for the region
Brenda Gavin: Making a venture capitalist
Experts from the Greater Philadelphia region started getting together in 2000 to discuss its life science community. Among the challenges noted in those gatherings, one involved image - or rather, the area's lack of an image as a life science cluster. An image subcommittee planned to change that. "It was a very deliberate strategy," says Karen Hanson, executive director of Biolaunch611+ KIZ and the convener of that image subcommittee. Hanson and her colleagues wanted to bring BIO - the Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual meeting - back to Philadelphia.
On BIO's first run in Philadelphia in 1996, it drew fewer than 4,000 attendees. By 2000, though, the meeting had ...
