As part of the city’s economic development team for bioscience, my colleagues and I are continuously talking to members of the bioscience industry. We have found that they are always interested in what the City is doing to promote our industry. We at the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) are excited to partner with LabToWallStreet through a regularly occurring Op-Ed column; a joint mission to keep you up to date on the City’s efforts to promote New York City bioscience locally, nationally, and around the world.

At the NYCEDC, we have fifteen people devoted to promoting the various industries in New York City: financial services, retail, airlines, media and entertainment, technology, and bioscience. Of those fifteen, three are devoted full-time to promoting the bioscience sector. We were hired during the Bloomberg administration, which is a testament to the Mayor’s commitment to this sector. Our mission, as we see it, is to ensure that New York City is recognized as one of the world’s top bioscience clusters. To that end, I would like to share with you what we are doing to achieve our mission:

1) Improving Awareness of New York City’s Bioscience Strengths: New York City suffers from a lack of awareness of our bioscience strengths. Although we have 10 renowned academic medical research institutions, 26 additional research institutions, 128 Nobel Prize

winners, 70 companies, and more than $1.2 billion annually in NIH funding, we are continuously left off the list of top bioscience clusters. We have several initiatives to address this problem.

The first is a new branding campaign for the City’s bioscience sector. We are developing a new and stronger message to announce that New York City has significant bioscience assets and that any competitive company must have a presence here. We plan to unveil this new and stronger message at BIO.

The second is to get the word out about what New York City has to offer. We recently worked with the bioscience publication The Scientist. Based on their work with us, they published an exclusive supplement focusing on New York City bioscience that reached over 675,000 readers worldwide.

We have also met with bioscience companies both locally and around the globe. In the last fourteen months, we have met with over 215 companies and sent information about our strengths to an additional 1,470. Finally, we have met with local New York City companies, including hosting a breakfast for NYC venture capitalists to encourage them to keep their money and their companies in New York City.

2) Real Estate: One of the chief complaints about starting or keeping a bioscience company in New York City is the lack of space. We are

addressing that problem with our recent release for proposals for the East River Science Park. We are also evaluating a number of other city-owned sites for bioscience use.

3)Better State and Regional Collaboration: We would like to work together more collabora­tively to promote bioscience in New York State and in the Tri-state area. Many of the regions in New York State and the Tri-State area have exciting programs and initiatives, but we are not advancing our goals in a coordinated manner. Given that our competitor states and regions are working together successfully, it is critical for us to work together to advance our common goal to build this industry in our region. While we are at the beginning of this process, we will be presenting a panel at the New York Biotechnology Association (NYBA) Conference

on regional collaboration and cooperation. We hope that working with these other regions on the panel will lead to additional collaboration and the ability to work together to achieve company attraction and legislative goals.

We hope that you are as excited as we are about our mission to ensure that New York City is recognized as one of the world’s top bioscience clusters. Please call or e-mail me, Monique Salazar at msalazar@ nycedc.com or 212-312-3779 or my colleague Bill Fair at bfair@nycedc.com or 212-312-3836, if you have any suggestions or thoughts on how we can better meet our mission of serving the New York bioscience community. Or if you are thinking of moving to or expanding in New York City, we would be happy to talk to you. We look forward to working with you.